Civil War: The History of England Volume III (65 page)

When parliament reassembled in February 1677, after a prorogation of fifteen months, it was claimed by Shaftesbury and others that such a long suspension of proceedings was illegal; Buckingham proposed a motion to that effect and cited two statutes of Edward III, which ordained that parliament should meet ‘once a year, or oftener, if need be’. This was considered to be an affront to the royal prerogative. Shaftesbury and Buckingham were ordered to retract their ‘ill-advised’ action and to ask pardon of king and
Lords. Both men refused and were promptly dispatched to the Tower for an indefinite period together with two other dissenting lords. Buckingham confessed his fault soon afterwards, and was released, while Shaftesbury preferred to remain in prison. ‘What, my lord,’ he called down to Buckingham as he departed the Tower, ‘are you leaving us so soon?’

‘Ay, my lord, you know that we giddy-pated fellows never stay long in one place at a time.’

France was still continuing its land war against the United Provinces, despite English withdrawal from the conflict, and in the spring of this year the French enjoyed a series of victories. The Commons reacted by reaffirming its animus against the French. The king was in any case suspect. He had in recent years acquired a French mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, made duchess of Portsmouth, thus binding his ties to the French court of which she was a prominent member as duchess of Aubigny. There is a famous story of the crowd threatening the coach of Nell Gwynn under the misapprehension that it contained the duchess; she called out, ‘Be silent, good people! I am the
Protestant
whore!’

Charles was in every sense a Frenchified king. An address was issued by both Houses of Parliament calling upon him to allay the anxieties of the nation by entering appropriate alliances with the opponents of Louis. At an audience with one of the ambassadors from the United Provinces, he threw his handkerchief into the air with the exclamation, ‘I care just that for parliament.’

On 23 May, however, the king invited the Commons to the Banqueting House in which he declared that ‘I do assure you on the word of a king that you shall not repent any trust you repose in me’; he then proceeded to ask for a further supply of money, ‘both to defend my subjects and offend my enemies’. They did not place very much faith in the king’s word, however, and two days later they found themselves ‘obliged (at present) to decline the granting your majesty the supply your majesty is pleased to demand’. They also called for the king to unite himself with the Dutch against the power of France.

An angry king then adjourned parliament on 28 May with a speech in which he said that ‘could I have been silent, I would rather have chosen to be so, than to call to mind things so unfit for you
to meddle with’. He had told the French ambassador, the month before, that ‘I put myself in trouble with my subjects for love of the French king’. Soon enough he was negotiating for further supplies from his much loved cousin that would more than match the money withheld from him by parliament. He had adjourned that assembly to the summer, but in fact it did not meet again until the beginning of the following year.

In the meantime the earl of Danby endeavoured to burnish the Protestant credentials of the regime by furthering the scheme of marrying Mary, elder daughter of the duke of York and therefore niece of the king, to William of Orange. William was the leader of the United Provinces even then threatened by the French; since he was a Protestant champion, the union might have seemed unwise to a king who relied upon French money. Yet Charles assented to the match in part to placate the public clamouring for an alliance with the United Provinces, and in part with the hope that he might be able to negotiate some treaty of peace between William and Louis. He could then emerge as the saviour of Europe. He was, in short, looking both ways at once. The belief of Louis XIV that the English king was quite unreliable was amply confirmed. He suspended his financial subsidy, and rejected Charles’s proposal for an extended truce between France and the United Provinces. The marriage between William and Mary was solemnized at the beginning of November, to much public rejoicing. The Protestant powers were matched.

Parliament met finally in the last week of January 1678, in a more amenable atmosphere. In his opening speech the king confirmed that he ‘had made such alliances with Holland as are for the preservation of Flanders’, and that he now required ‘a plentiful supply’. The Commons resolved that all trade between England and France should be curtailed and that no peace could be made until France had withdrawn to its previous frontiers. In February the members proceeded to vote him £1 million for prosecuting the war against France. The money would not in fact be enough to wage a successful campaign, but Charles had in any case no intention of declaring war on Louis.

He was in a trap or, rather, by his double-dealing he had trapped himself. A period followed in which parliament was adjourned or
reconvened on almost a monthly basis; the shortest session was 6 days and the longest 172 days while the recesses lasted from 10 days to 15 months. This aberrant pattern is a measure of the confusion into which public policy had fallen. Charles did not know where to turn. He wanted the French subsidy from Louis but he had also been promised by parliament £1 million to furnish the means to attack him. He was making active preparations for war against France, while at the same time assuring the French ambassador of his devotion to Louis.

Parliament was also thrown into doubt. It had voted funds to raise an army of 30,000 men, but what if the king should use that army for his own ends? Charles and Danby were consequently feared and distrusted. The French king was liberally distributing bribes to various parties, and all men complained that darkness and deep mist covered the affairs of state. Sir William Temple explained in his
Memoirs
that ‘from these humours arose those uncertainties in our counsels that no man, who was not behind the curtain, could tell what to make of’ the confused rumours and reports.

Towards the end of March 1678 the king instructed Danby to write to the English ambassador in Paris, Ralph Montagu, with an outline of possible peace proposals; Charles then demanded the payment of 6 million
livres
a year (more than £4,000 of gold) for three years, in return for using his influence with the Dutch to negotiate a treaty. The whole arrangement was to be hidden in the most complete secrecy and Montagu ‘must not mention a syllable of the money’. In his own hand the king added that ‘I approve of this letter’. It was perhaps the only way that he could have persuaded Danby to write it. Louis promptly refused the request, but Charles had left another hostage to fortune that would in time severely damage Danby himself.

Then Louis caught Charles unawares by making a separate peace with the United Provinces, leaving no room for the English king to manoeuvre himself into the good graces of one party or the other. He had in a sense been abandoned by his French cousin. This gave him pause for thought. He was walking through St James’s Park on a summer morning, in the middle of August, when he was approached by a chemist who worked in the royal laboratory. Charles, ever affable and courteous, greeted Christopher Kirkby with a salutation.

Kirkby then informed him that a Jesuit plot had been detected against his life; the sovereign was to be stabbed or poisoned so that the Catholic James, duke of York, could be raised to the throne. Charles, always inclined to dismiss such conspiracies as little more than hot air, advised Kirkby to consult his confidential secretary. Some desultory enquiries followed, in the course of which a long indictment against certain Jesuits was discovered. The supposed author of this indictment, Titus Oates, was then brought before a committee of the privy council to justify his accusations. Thus began the episode that became known as the ‘Popish Plot’.

Roger North described Oates as ‘a low man, of an ill cut, very short neck; and his visage and features were most particular. His mouth was the centre of his face . . .’ He had a low forehead, long nose, and huge chin; his voice was high, and his manner dramatic. Yet he was very plausible. He outlined the meetings and consultations of the Jesuits in confident detail, and went on to name two prominent men as the authors of the plot. He accused Sir George Wakeman, physician to the queen, of planning to poison Charles; he also cited Edward Coleman, her secretary and previously secretary to the duke of York. The Catholic heir apparent was therefore touched. One of the councillors who listened to this damning testimony, Sir Henry Coventry, observed that ‘if he be a liar, he is the greatest and adroitest I ever saw’.

Then a sudden death seemed to confirm Oates’s testimony. He had previously sworn an affidavit to the truth of these matters before a London magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey; he had told Godfrey that he had attended a clandestine meeting of Jesuits at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand, where the various methods of assassinating the king were discussed. It seems that Godfrey was alarmed to see the name of an acquaintance, Edward Coleman, on the list of suspects. On 12 October Godfrey did not return to his home. Five days later his body was found in a ditch on Primrose Hill, run through with his own sword. A coroner’s inquest then concluded that the body had been taken to Primrose Hill on the day it was discovered, and that multiple bruising about the upper part of it and, in particular, the neck was indication that he had been strangled. Had he been murdered by the Catholics in fear of their discovery? Had he been killed by the supporters of Oates,
who feared that his lying would be proven? Had he committed suicide? The truth of the matter will never be known.

Alarms and prophecies were already circulating. In the previous year a blazing comet had hurtled through the sky, and in 1678 occurred three eclipses of the sun and two of the moon. William Dade’s
Prognostication
divined ‘frenzies, inflammations and new infirmities proceeding from cholerick humours’ while John Partridge’s
Calendarium Judaicum
predicted ‘troubles from great men and nobles’. In this atmosphere of anxiety, the discovery of Godfrey’s body prompted mass panic and hysteria about a possible Catholic rising. The lords-lieutenant of the counties were ordered to search the homes of Catholics for hidden weapons, and of course the more general fear of a French invasion in favour of an uprising was never far from the surface. It was also widely believed that many thousands of apparently orthodox Protestants were in fact Catholics in disguise, waiting for a sign. One contemporary observer, Sir John Reresby, wrote that ‘it seemed as if the very cabinet of hell had been laid open’.

When the papers of Edward Coleman were taken it was revealed that he had written certain suspect letters to Jesuit priests, close to Louis XIV, asking for money on the grounds that he and his colleagues ‘had a mighty work on their hands, no less than the conversion of three kingdoms’. It may have been a piece of bravura, and seemed to have no connection with the plot outlined by Oates, but in the present circumstances it was explosive.

The publication of this plot, together with the possible collusion of James, admirably suited the intentions of Shaftesbury who could come forward as the champion of Protestantism. He had left the Tower for his Dorset estates a few months before, after making a formal apology to the king, but he could now take up the cause of ‘No Popery!’ with fresh justification and enthusiasm. It had become his abiding purpose to exclude James from the throne of England. He commented later that ‘I will not say who started the game, but I am sure I had the full hunting of it’.

When parliament reassembled on 21 October 1678, he and his supporters were in charge of the pack. Committees were established to secure the king’s safety and to investigate the plot. Both Houses of Parliament unanimously carried a resolution that ‘there has been, and still is, a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on
by popish recusants, for the assassinating and murdering the king, and for subverting the government and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion’. Oates appeared before the Commons on three consecutive days and, as a result of his testimony, five Catholic peers were arrested. A bill was passed that excluded Catholics from both houses. Shaftesbury proposed that the king should be asked to dismiss James, duke of York, from his council.

At the end of November Titus Oates further raised the temperature when he appeared at the bar of the House of Commons. ‘I, Titus Oates, accuse Catherine, queen of England, of high treason.’ This alarmed the members who voted that the queen and her household should be removed from Whitehall. The Lords were not so hasty, however, and examined the witnesses who had testified against her; they were not convinced of their veracity and suppressed the charges brought by Oates. The king had previously held a private interview with Oates during which the informer had laid the charges against his wife; he kept his temper but ordered that all of Oates’s papers should be seized and that his consultations with other people should be supervised.

The king does not seem to have believed a word that Oates uttered, but he could not openly withstand the full force of Protestant rage. As one of his ministers, the marquis of Halifax, put it, ‘it must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no’. Measures against papists were made more severe, therefore, and the five Catholic lords held in the Tower were impeached of high treason. A second Test Act was passed obliging all Catholics in the Lords or Commons to repeat the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. In the course of the debate one peer declared that ‘I would not have so much as a popish man or a popish woman to remain here; not so much as a popish dog or a popish bitch; not so much as a popish cat to purr or mew about the king’. At the beginning of December Edward Coleman was dragged to Tyburn where he was hanged, drawn and quartered; in 1929 he was beatified as a Catholic martyr.

Another act of this political drama now opened with the decision of Ralph Montagu to attack the earl of Danby. It was he who, as ambassador in Paris, had received the earl’s letter concerning a secret subsidy from the French king to Charles. He had lost his office in the summer of this year, for the crime of corrupting the
daughter of the king’s former mistress, Lady Castlemaine, and now sought revenge. Another party may also have been involved. Louis XIV, knowing of Danby’s antipathy to the French cause, had reasons enough to want him removed.