Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (61 page)

The armies of Louis XIV had more success. They poured across the Rhine in the first two weeks of June and attacked the territories of the United Provinces; there seemed no possibility of withstanding their advance, and some of the principal cities were obliged to open their gates to the invaders. The fires from the French camps could be seen from Amsterdam. Of the seven republics of the United Provinces, only Holland and Zealand remained unconquered. At this perilous juncture the Dutch opened their dykes and flooded the country to prevent any further French advance. The land war came to a peremptory halt.

Charles had asked for a further £1 million from the French king, for the maintenance of the war, but Louis had refused. So Charles had no choice but to recall parliament in the hope of obtaining funds. Parliament returned in February 1673. In its absence a war had been declared and a declaration of religious indulgence had been issued. It might have seemed superfluous to requirements, except that it knew its power over the raising of money. The king had hoped to meet its members after a successful campaign against the Dutch, but that possibility had been removed.

A new lord chancellor had become the king’s official spokesman in the lords. The earl of Shaftesbury would soon become the most controversial man in the kingdom but, in these years, he was one of the most vigorous supporters of the royal prerogative; Charles would eventually describe him as ‘the weakest and wickedest man of the age’ but at this time he relied upon his judgement as an administrator and adviser. Shaftesbury had been an enthusiastic supporter of Oliver Cromwell, and even a member of the Barebone’s Parliament, but by dint of eloquence and industry he had managed to exorcize his interesting past. He would in turn inspire one of the most powerful pieces of satirical verse when he was denounced by John Dryden in
Absalom and Achitophel:

For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfixt in principles and place;

In pow’r unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace.

A fiery soul which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy-body to decay.

Parliament met in an unsettled and fractious mood. It was angry in particular that the king had seen fit to issue a declaration of religious indulgence without obtaining its consent; his action was deemed to be unconstitutional. Parliament was not necessarily opposed to the Dutch war but, if it was to vote supplies for the continuation of hostilities, its authority must be reasserted. The Commons then passed a resolution that parliamentary statutes concerning religion could not be suspended or cancelled except by Act of Parliament, thus denying the king’s power in matters of ‘indulgence’.

Charles tried to resist with the help of the Lords but, in desperate need of money, eventually he submitted. After a number of rancorous exchanges he cancelled the declaration of indulgence and said that ‘what had been done with respect to the suspension of the penal laws should never be drawn into consequence’. The king broke the seal of the original declaration with his own hands. Bonfires were lit in the streets of London and, by the end of the month, Charles had received the supply of funds he so badly needed.

Parliament had taken aim at papists rather than dissenters, since the Catholic recusants were still believed to pose a threat to the state. Abednego Seller, in
The History of Passive Obedience
, suggested that ‘treason in papists is like original sin to mankind; they all have it in their natures, though many of them may deny it, or not know it’. Some members believed that the ‘declaration’ had in fact been part of a papist plot concocted by Charles and Louis to impose that religion upon England.

So in March 1673, the Commons passed a measure that became known as the Test Act. All aspirants to office or to a place of trust were to swear the oath of royal supremacy as well as the oath of allegiance, thus placing king before pope; they were also obliged to take the sacrament according to the rite of the Church of England and to swear that ‘I declare that I believe there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’. This struck at the heart of Catholic belief. When the king gave his assent to the Test Act a ‘great hum’ of approval arose in parliament. Charles was heard to say that he would now purge his court of all Catholics except his barber, ‘whom he mean[s] to keep in despite of all their bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand’. The remark had a point; the king trusted the Catholic who put a razor to his throat.

The first casualty was James, duke of York, who was obliged to retire from public life. He resigned as lord high admiral and command of the fleet was entrusted to Prince Rupert, who last appeared in these pages as the leader of the royalist cavalry during the Civil War. It was therefore advertised to the world that the king’s brother and heir apparent was a Roman Catholic; immediately rumour and innuendo began to surround him. It was widely believed, for example, that the lord chancellor himself, the earl of Shaftesbury, was plotting against him in an effort to exclude him from the throne. When James did not receive communion with his brother in the royal chapel John Evelyn wrote in his diary that it ‘gave exceeding grief and scandal to the whole nation, that the heir of it, and the son of a martyr for the Protestant religion, should apostatize. What the consequence of this will be, God only knows, and wise men dread.’

One of the king’s principal councillors and one of the original ‘cabal’, Thomas Clifford, also resigned all of his posts. He was a secret Catholic, and it had been suggested that the Test Act was in part formulated by his rivals precisely in order to remove him from office. He died soon after. Confidence now flowed to yet another of Charles’s ministers. Thomas Osborne, soon to become the earl of Danby, was a staunch Anglican who had opposed the Dutch war; he had also been a signal success as an administrator and, on Clifford’s resignation, he was appointed to be lord treasurer.

The preparation for another year of hostilities with the Dutch was not undertaken with any great enthusiasm; the discovery of James’s Catholicism called into further question the alliance with papist France and the attack upon a fellow Protestant state. The king himself is reported to have been vacillating and inconsistent, ready to prosecute war on one day and ready to retire from conflict on the next. Shaftesbury said of his master that ‘there is not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence in his word or friendship’.

In July Charles ordered Rupert to avoid any naval confrontation unless he could be sure to win it decisively. He had already returned to negotiations with the Dutch, and simply wished to apply pressure upon them. No such clear outcome emerged from the last sea battle of the war, the battle of the Texel, when the Dutch and English vessels fought a long and inconclusive struggle that left the waters filled with wreckage and floating bodies. It was notable, also, for the inactivity of the French fleet that simply stood apart and watched. Prince Rupert wrote later of the French admiral’s reluctance to become involved that ‘it wanted neither signal nor instruction to tell him what he should then have done; the case was so plain to every man’s eye in the whole fleet’. It was now believed by many that Louis XIV was happy to watch the two maritime nations destroy one another’s navies, thus adding more fire to the anger of the English against their nominal allies.

James increased the anti-Catholic bias of the nation by taking advantage of the parliamentary recess to betroth himself to a papist princess. His previous wife, Anne Hyde, had died two years earlier, leaving him with two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. The new bride was of quite another nature. Mary of Modena was fifteen but already a devout Catholic, and it was reported that the French king highly approved of the match and might even provide a dowry for the occasion. The imminent prospect of a royal Catholic dynasty was not one that the English favoured. When Mary eventually arrived in England she was generally greeted with sullen silence by the populace. When she was allowed to sit in the queen’s presence, the English ladies ‘humped’ and walked out.

When parliament reconvened towards the end of October 1673, the outcry against the marriage was immediate. Sir William Temple declared that the effort to defeat papistry with the Test Act would come to nothing ‘if it got footing so near the throne’ and he begged the king to forbid the proposed match. A resolution to that effect was almost unanimously approved.

A broader assault upon the administration now began. Some of the members had already stated that they would not vote a penny more for the war unless and until they had a voice in its management. A resolution to that effect was amended with the proviso that no money should be granted until the previous supply of war funds had been collected. It was also found necessary to give room for a debate on ‘grievances’, principal among them the French alliance and the war against the Dutch. At the beginning of November it was declared that the standing army was also a ‘grievance’, perhaps not the most appropriate note to be struck during a war. On 5 November the old sport of pope-burning returned to the streets, when the effigy of Pope Clement X was set on fire by the London apprentices. A figure of a Frenchman was also used for target practice.

Charles was aware that his lord chancellor, the earl of Shaftesbury, had helped to foment opposition against his brother and that he was steadily becoming the leading spokesman for the Protestant interest. So he dismissed him from his councils, and appointed Heneage Finch as lord chancellor; it was reported that the king changed his mind six times, in as many hours, over the appointment. The Venetian envoy reported to the doge and senate that ‘the king calls a cabinet council for the purpose of not listening to it, and the ministers hold forth in it so as not to be understood’.

Shaftesbury did not go quietly, however, and against the king’s direct order remained in London to recruit allies for his anti-Catholic cause; for the rest of his political life he would organize the opposition to the king. When parliament met again at the beginning of 1674, after a brief prorogation, the attack moved on to the king’s principal ministers who were ‘popishly affected, or otherwise obnoxious and dangerous’. Lauderdale had ruled on the king’s behalf in Scotland, and was accused of favouring absolutism; it was resolved therefore that the king should remove him from ‘all his employments and from the royal presence and councils for ever’.

The duke of Buckingham was next to be arraigned and agreed to speak before the Commons; he tried to excuse himself by shifting the blame onto the ineptitude of others, and declared that ‘I can hunt the hare with a pack of hounds but not with a pack of lobsters’. It was widely believed that the lobsters in question were the king and his brother. His wit did not impress the Commons, however, and it was determined that he should also be removed from all of his employments. Buckingham later complained that ‘men ruined by their princes and in disgrace are like places struck with thunder; it is accounted unlawful to approach them’.

Arlington was then in turn impeached for treason and crimes of high misdemeanour, but his case was ceded to a special committee. The ‘cabal’ had in any case now been dissolved. It was obvious to everyone that the king was ready to sacrifice ministers when he had no further use for them.

He was also engaged in extreme and unwise deception. Shaftesbury had opposed the king’s measures in part because he had become acquainted, by one means or another, with the secret treaty whereby Charles became the pensionary of the king of France in exchange for his conversion to Catholicism. At the opening of parliament in January 1674, however, Charles stated that rumours of ‘secret articles of dangerous consequence’ were completely untrue and he declared, ‘I assure you, there is no other treaty with France, either before or since, not already printed, which shall not be made known.’ He was perceived to fumble with his notes at this point.

It had now become clear that the war against the Dutch could not be continued; the Spanish had now entered an alliance with the enemy and it was unthinkable that England would also declare war against Spain. Too much trade was at stake. So the Dutch now appointed the Spanish envoy in London as an arbitrator for peace. It could not come soon enough for all the participants. The Dutch agreed to pay an indemnity and consented to salute the English flag at sea; this was really a question of saving face, on the English side, and the outcome was hardly enough to justify a costly and bloody war of two years’ duration. The king announced the peace to parliament on 24 February, and then unexpectedly prorogued the session until November. The members of the Commons looked upon one another in amazement in light of the fact that, in the words of Lord Conway, ‘they had sat so long upon eggs and could hatch nothing’. Conway also observed that ‘now there will be a new game played at court, and the designs and interests of all men will be different from what they were’.

*   *   *

Thomas Osborne, who had emerged as the king’s principal minister, was created earl of Danby in the summer of the year. He was a determined and pugnacious Yorkshireman who firmly believed that the Anglican faith was of paramount importance in unifying the nation and who had as a result favoured alliances with the Protestant states of Europe. He was determined to reform royal finances, and to maintain control over parliament by any and every means possible; those methods included clandestine payments to members from secret service funds and the select distribution of various titles or offices. Danby did his best to demonstrate that the king was wholly in favour of the Anglican cause, and that Charles was determined to maintain an anti-French and an anti-Catholic stance.

As a pronounced royalist and courtier he was of course opposed by the earl of Shaftesbury and by the duke of Buckingham who, abandoned by the king, now joined together in the campaign against the court. It has been often observed that in the creation of these factions and interests we may see the modest beginnings of ‘party’ in the contemporary sense. From 1674 forward an ‘opposition’ to the royal cause began to emerge in the Commons, with the aim of imposing restrictions upon the king’s power and of upholding the supremacy of parliament.