Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (64 page)

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The election in the early weeks of 1679, after the dissolution of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, was necessarily fought on the choice between king and parliament. Since the mood of the country had turned against the king, after the revelation of the ‘Popish Plot’ and the disgrace of Danby, the new parliament was even more hostile to the court than its predecessor. The king himself remarked that a dog would be elected if it stood against a figure from court. Shaftesbury, the principal benefactor of this change of mood, calculated that 158 ‘courtiers’ had been elected against 302 of the ‘opposition’.

The king had to deal with two pressing matters in advance of negotiating with the new parliament. He met the earl of Danby and requested him to resign his office; in exchange he would be granted the title of marquis, and receive a large annual pension. Since most of his dependants had been voted out of parliament, his ministry was effectively already at an end. A new politics, of agitation and campaign, had emerged.

The archbishop of Canterbury had been asked to discuss with James, duke of York, the prospect of his returning to the Anglican communion; the duke refused. The king then summoned his brother and ordered him to retire beyond the seas as the only way of averting the displeasure of parliament. James fought hard against this sentence of exile but, at the beginning of March, made a lachrymose departure for the Spanish Netherlands on the pretext that he was visiting his daughter and new son-in-law, William of Orange.

Yet the new parliament would not be diverted from its pursuit of the ‘Popish Plot’ or the impeachment of Danby, especially after it was revealed that the earl had received a pardon from the king. A week after its assembly he resigned and in the following month he was sent to the Tower by the Lords. When Lord Halifax condemned the decision to confer a marquisate upon ‘a traitor to his country’ he fixed his eyes upon the king who was watching the proceedings. ‘My God!’ the king was said later to have exclaimed, ‘how I am ill-treated; and I must bear it, and keep silence!’

In the spring of the year, just after the parliament had met, the king announced a change in the administration. He dissolved the privy council and established in its place a smaller council of thirty-three members comprising office-holders and independents. In what at the time seemed a surprising and even shocking move he appointed Shaftesbury as its lord president together with four members of parliament who had always been resolute in opposing him. His purpose may have been to tame or to corrupt these men, but the nominations may simply have afforded a screen to conceal his real intentions. Some of the new counsellors lost their former influence, in any case, and were widely regarded as having sold themselves to the king. The members of the council were soon divided among themselves, and proved to be singularly ineffective. That may also have been the king’s intention. Charles distrusted all of them and confided to the earl of Aylesbury that ‘they shall know nothing’. He was isolated, after Danby had been removed from office, and he told Sir William Temple that ‘he had none left with whom he could so much as speak of them in confidence’. In his fight against vigorous and well-organized parliamentary opponents, he was on his own.

Towards the end of April 1679, an address was introduced that was designed to exclude the duke of York from the crown of England; it was said that the ‘Popish Plot’ had been encouraged by his likely succession to the throne. It marked the formal beginning of what became known as the ‘exclusion crisis’, and was the cause of much partisan rancour. Pamphlets and verse satires came from the presses; the votes of parliament were published and widely disseminated. The ‘exclusionists’ in large part controlled the Commons, but legislation could not pass without the consent of the king and the Lords.

Nevertheless an Exclusion Bill quickly received its first and second readings; it pronounced that the duke of York had been seduced by papal agents into entering the Roman communion, and that it was the duty of parliament to exclude him from the throne. One member, Sir John Trevor, stated that ‘the king’s eyes are closed; he knows nothing of the danger that we are in…’ The mood of hysteria was translated beyond the walls of parliament. It was said that the citizens slept with pistols beside them, and that their wives carried knives into the street. At the beginning of July Charles, exasperated by the proceedings, prorogued parliament. The unpopularity of his decision was such that he doubled the guards at Whitehall. Shaftesbury declared that the royal advisers should pay for the decision with their heads.

The session left only one permanent memorial in the form of a Habeas Corpus Act which decreed that no person could be unlawfully detained and that all those charged with felony or treason should be granted a speedy trial or discharge from prison. This was designed as a means of public safety in the event of James’s ascending the throne. In his
Commentaries on the Laws of England
Sir William Blackstone wrote that ‘the point of time at which I would choose to fix this
theoretical
perfection of our public law is the year 1679; after the habeas corpus act was passed, and that for licensing the press had expired…’ The sudden prorogation had indeed meant that the laws inhibiting the press had not been renewed, so that the rage of party could now be fully conveyed in the public prints.

In the latter half of 1679, the terms of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ became common currency. The Presbyterian rebels of Scotland, ever zealous for a stricter covenant, had been given the name of Whiggamores after the Scottish word for corrupt or sour whey; the Irish royalist Catholics, who had been reduced to banditry, had the Gaelic name of
toraihde
. Soon enough Shaftesbury’s Whigs, who supported the Protestant Church and favoured the exclusion of James, would oppose Danby’s Tories, who were prepared to countenance a Catholic king as part of the divine order of natural succession. The Whigs were the enemies of popery and arbitrary government, and thus wished to limit royal power; the Tories were determined to defend the monarch and the constitution against the onslaught of those whom they considered to be republicans or rebels. Various factions could of course be observed on both sides and a third group of ‘trimmers’, who pursued a middle course, was also evident. A sympathetic witness, the duke of Ormonde, described the ‘trimmers’ as using the language of ‘moderation, unity and peace’ combining the Whig concern for the maintenance of property and the true religion with the Tory desire for a secure monarchy and an untouched royal prerogative.

Moderation and unity were not readily apparent in a political nation violently divided. The Green Ribbon Club, perhaps the first ever political club, consisted of a variety of groups of Whigs including dissenters, lawyers and merchants; it met at the King’s Head Tavern on the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, where it was accustomed to plan its strategy and to co-ordinate its tactics. As avowed supporters of Shaftesbury, its members wore green ribbons and thus identified themselves as a ‘party’. They paid customary obeisance to the royal prerogative but more often than not they talked of their responsibilities to ‘the people’; one phrase, ‘
salus populi suprema lex’
, was often repeated: ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’. This would in effect have created a political revolution, albeit without the bloodshed of another civil war.

Charles believed that if his opponents managed to get rid of James he himself would surely follow. He was engaged in a battle for his survival. His opponents believed that, under increasing pressure, he would eventually submit and bar his brother from the throne; many now looked to the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, a Protestant, as the next heir. Shaftesbury even argued that the king was pretending to oppose exclusion while all the time hoping to be ‘forced’ to agree to his natural son’s accession. It is true that he had a low opinion of his brother. When James cautioned him from walking in St James’s Park without a guard he replied, ‘I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you king.’ It was unlikely, however, that Charles would deny James his lawful right to succeed.

The French ambassador observed that the king’s ‘conduct is so secret and impenetrable that even the most skilful observers are misled. The king has secret dealings and contacts with all the factions and those who are most opposed to his interests flatter themselves that they will win him over to their side.’ The ambassador may have credited the king with too much cunning; it is possible that Charles simply moved from one expedient to the next.

The duke of Monmouth, the Protestant candidate for the succession, now covered himself with glory or at least with blood. A band of covenanters dragged the primate of Scotland, Archbishop Sharp, from his coach outside the town of St Andrews and stabbed him to death in front of his daughter; they then went on to defeat a royalist squadron sent after them. Monmouth was now dispatched to the north with a large army where, at Bothwell Bridge, he routed the covenanters. The subsequent repression of these enthusiasts became known as ‘the killing time’. Monmouth became the hero of the hour, his ambitions for the throne significantly increased; as a Protestant he was Shaftesbury’s preferred candidate, and James looked on in alarm from his exile in Brussels as the king’s favour towards his natural son increased.

Charles had, a few months earlier, signed a document in which he explained that ‘for the voiding of any dispute which may happen in time concerning the succession of the Crown, I do hereby declare in the presence of Almighty God that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catharine now living’. He had declared to the world that Monmouth was illegitimate, therefore, but the king was not inexpert at lying.

When Monmouth returned to London, the people assembled in the streets where bonfires were lit and toasts were drunk. He was considered by many to be the champion of the Protestant faith and, as the first illegitimate son of Charles II, the true heir to the throne. Despite the king’s denial it was claimed that a ‘black box’, carefully concealed, contained a contract of marriage between Charles and Lucy Walters; Lucy Walters had been one of his first mistresses, while in continental exile, and had borne this particular son. Monmouth was handsome and affable, in every respect a royal boy, and on his journeys through the kingdom he was treated with as much ceremony as his father. Wherever he went he was escorted by columns of gentlemen and admirers. He was, in the words of Macaulay, ‘the most popular man in the kingdom’. It is perhaps no wonder that his thoughts turned towards the crown. The shield that bore his coat of arms quartered the lions of England and the lilies of France as a symbol of his aspirations. He had even begun to ‘touch’ for the king’s evil.

In July 1679, the king decided to turn the prorogation of parliament into a dissolution, pending a new general election; he was gambling that public sentiment had turned towards him. And indeed there were many now who questioned the wisdom and loyalty of Shaftesbury in his relentless pursuit of the duke of York. Yet at the hustings in the summer of the year the Whig Party, as we may now term it, was in full cry against the Catholic heir. When the clergy of Essex were believed to incline to the court interest, they were called ‘dumb dogs … Jesuitical dogs … dark lanterns … Baal’s priests … jacks and villains … the black guard … the black regiment of hell!’ The Whigs were in turn dismissed by the Tories as a ‘rabble’ of disloyal and rebellious traitors. Lists were drawn up by both sides, noting down the names of ‘the vile’ and ‘the worthy’. Sir Ralph Verney, soon to become a member of parliament, remarked that ‘there are vast feuds in our Chilterns as well as in our Vale, occasioned by elections, and so ’tis, I suppose, all over England’.

But then all the problems of succession became more acute. Towards the end of August the king fell seriously ill, and was for two or three days in danger of death. James was summoned from Brussels to be by his brother’s side, and perhaps to take the crown; he came to England disguised in a black wig. Meanwhile Monmouth’s supporters began to intrigue on his behalf. The political nation was in confusion.

43

Or at the Cock?

On 12 January 1675, a conversation took place in London. It was ostensibly about china, that commodity then being the rage of the town. Lady Fidget desires some from a dear male acquaintance ‘for he knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some’. The gentleman’s name is Horner, whose welcome for Lady Fidget alarms her husband.

Sir Jaspar:
Wife! My Lady Fidget! He is coming into you the back way!

Lady Fidget:
Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.

Sir Jaspar:
He’ll catch you, and use you roughly, and be too strong for you.

Lady Fidget:
Don’t you trouble yourself, let him if he can.

Horner, having been detained in his chamber with Lady Fidget, is asked a few minutes later if he has any china left.

Horner:
Upon my honour I have none left now.

Mrs Squeamish:
Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come.

Horner:
This lady had the last there.

Lady Fidget:
Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

Mrs Squeamish:
Oh, but it may be he may have some you could not find.

Lady Fidget:
What, d’ye think if he had any left, I would not have had it too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough.