The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  In contrast to Scotland, in religious matters the majority of the Irish fared quite well, owing to Charles’s sympathy for Roman Catholicism. Catholics had fought for him and hidden him, while his wife, his mother and his favourite mistress were all Catholics. Under Charles’s lord lieutenant in Ireland, the Earl of Ormonde (created duke in 1661), the Mass was once more unofficially allowed to be heard. It was in Ireland that one of the great problems of the Restoration, how and to whom should confiscated estates be restored, was shown in its purest form. Despite their huge sacrifices for Charles’s father, most of the Catholic Irish royalists never received back a penny for the estates seized as punishment by Cromwell and redistributed to his soldiers–who formed too convenient a new addition to the Protestant garrison in Ireland to be disturbed.

  It was with his leanings to Catholicism that Charles II would come most perilously into conflict with the nation he had been recalled to rule. His sympathy for the French Catholic king and rumoured secret dealings began to inflame the old Puritan party, who were already angered by the Anglican settlement of the Church. Under the former Cromwellian Lord Ashley, a Parliamentarian in the mould of Hampden and Pym, a bitter Parliamentary opposition to Charles II was created. For, at the Restoration, Catholicism represented to the English psyche as strongly as ever the tyranny and absolutism that Parliament had fought two civil wars to overcome.

  Since the early days of Cromwell, English foreign policy had been to back France against Spain in the struggle for mastery in Europe. The Restoration government merely continued that theme, helped by the intimacy between the two sovereigns. Charles II was not just closely related to the French king Louis XIV–they were first cousins–he had also spent a great deal of time at his court during the Interregnum. He saw Louis as a real friend to whom he could turn in times of trouble. It was Louis, keen to draw England more tightly into his net of alliances against Spain, who had arranged the marriage of Charles to Catherine of Braganza, sister of the King of Portugal.

  This marriage was extremely fortunate for the burgeoning English trade with India for it brought England the port of Bombay in India, as well as Tangier in Africa. Bombay soon became the East India Company’s most lucrative place of trade, its acquisition marking the real beginning of the British Empire in India. Nevertheless, the Portuguese marriage had contemporary significance because it was a hit against Spain. Portugal had only just become independent again after three-quarters of a century under Spanish rule, thanks to French aid and French soldiers. When Charles II sold Dunkirk back to France to please Louis in 1662, it seemed to reflect the unwelcome and growing influence that the French king had over his cousin. It began to be said that England was the tool of France.

  By the mid-1660s, after five short years, the honeymoon between Charles II and Parliament had ended. An interminable and unsuccessful Second Dutch War, the unceasingly scandalous and expensive royal mistresses–all of whom seemed to be ladies-in-waiting to the queen–and the corruption and extravagance of the court were proving increasingly unpopular, their enormous costs prompting questions in the House of Commons. The king had also begun to show tendencies that reminded Parliament all too unhappily of his ancestors, when he attempted without success to declare an Act of Indulgence to counteract the Act of Uniformity. He wanted Parliament to pass the measure to ‘enable him to exercise with a more universal satisfaction that power of dispensing which he conceived to be inherent in him’. Since the king’s inability to suspend or dispense with the law had been one of the rallying cries that began Parliament’s resistance to Charles I, this was hardly promising.

  In 1665 the Black Death returned to England–this time known as the Great Plague–and killed 70,000 people. It was followed the next year by the Great Fire of London, which in five days burned down half the city and no fewer than eighty-nine parish churches, as well as old St Paul’s. In the face of these great natural catastrophes, many contemporaries abandoned their recently acquired habits of scientific reasoning and concluded that the two events represented the judgement of God on an immoral people.

  Once more, as it had during the Black Death, the terrible cry of ‘Bring out your dead!’ was heard, though this time medical advances counselled isolation and the marking of plague houses with a red cross. In an effort to prevent themselves breathing in the germs which were believed to carry the bubonic plague, the well-to-do carried little bunches of flowers in which to bury their noses. From this custom dates the macabre nursery rhyme (sneezing was one of the symptoms of the disease):

  Ring a ring a roses

  Pocket full of posies

  Atishoo, atishoo

  We all fall down.

  As before, the Great Plague was carried by the black rat, now proliferating thanks to the dramatic growth of the Port of London made necessary by the inflow of produce from the colonies.

  Such was the fear of papists that the Great Fire, which started in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane, was widely assumed to be the work of Roman Catholics. Charles II and the Duke of York endeared themselves to the city by taking a hands-on role in helping to extinguish the flames. It was the duke who put an end to the blaze, using gunpowder to blow up houses and make a gap the fire could not pass over.

  But it was not enough to revive the royal popularity that had prevailed at the time of the Restoration in 1660. The openly Catholic leanings of the court aroused mounting suspicion, greatly aggravated by rumours that the Duke of York, next in line to the throne, was in the process of converting.

  If the Plague and the Fire seemed a judgement on a corrupt court said to be in the pocket of the French, the final straw came in 1667. Having blockaded the Thames, the Dutch had the effrontery to sail up the Medway and capture some of the best English warships. As if that was not bad enough, Louis XIV–the supposed friend of England–suddenly switched sides and backed the Dutch. He was alarmed by the rapid growth of English colonies when his ultimate plan was for France to replace the Spanish Empire as a worldwide power. All was chaos and confusion, and England now faced two formidable enemies. Some sort of scapegoat was needed to deflect the anger rising in Parliament against the king. The chosen figure was the architect of Charles II’s return, his faithful servant Lord Clarendon.

  Although Clarendon was the father of the Duke of York’s wife and grandfather of the two heiresses to the throne, Princess Mary and Princess Anne, he was unpopular at court as he disdained to hide his disapproval of its louche behaviour. Moreover, having been the king’s tutor once he could not break himself of the habit of treating his former pupil as if he were still a schoolboy. Nevertheless he was a loyal servant, whose veneration for the House of Stuart was such that he had opposed the marriage of his daughter, as a mere commoner, to the Duke of York. But, like his father, Charles II had a ruthless side. He did not hesitate to throw his servant to the House of Commons. Unlike his father, though, Charles had the goodness of heart to warn Clarendon of his impending fate so that he should not be imprisoned or executed but could escape to France. There he died after completing his magisterial account of the Civil War, The History of the Great Rebellion.

  The Second Dutch War had grown out of rivalry between the Dutch and the English in North America. As well as expanding south–the large new colony of Carolina had been established in 1663, like its capital Charleston named for the king–English settlers began to fill up the land between Maryland and the states of New England, which the Dutch considered to be their own territory. Stalemate in the war led to a new peace signed at Breda which gave the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to the English, who were commanded by the Duke of York. It was renamed New York in his honour, though its largest island retained its Dutch name, Manhattan. Acquiring New York was crucial for the string of British colonies running along the eastern coast of America. New Amsterdam had prevented a continuity of national settlement between northern New England and the south; now that it had changed hands, the land began to fill up with English settlers.

  These colonia
l successes made Louis XIV more anxious than ever to ensure that England was contained within his net of alliances. To his annoyance, the disparate collection of new ministers who had masterminded the fall of Clarendon were united by their distrust of French ambition. Known as the Cabal from the acronym made by the first letters of their name Lords Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham (the son of Charles I’s favourite), Arlington and Lauderdale, they made a new Protestant alliance with Holland and Sweden. This Triple Alliance temporarily halted Louis in his tracks, forcing him to withdraw from his campaign to overrun the Spanish Netherlands on behalf of his wife, sister of the King of Spain.

  The displeased Sun King therefore changed tack. Feelers were once more put out to Charles via his sister Minette, the Duchess of Orléans, who was married to Louis’ brother, known as Monsieur. By 1670, when the two monarchs signed the Treaty of Dover, Louis XIV had lured Charles and England back into his camp: they were now committed to go to war with him against Holland, in return for a stretch of the Dutch coast and the island of Walcheren, near the mouth of the Scheldt.

  There was a secret clause in the treaty, however, which was to have enormous costs. For Louis the price was the massive sum of £160,000 a year to be paid secretly to his cousin to make Charles independent of an increasingly restive and unbiddable Parliament. For Charles it was much greater. He sacrificed the last shreds of confidence that the English nation had in the Stuarts as kings. For by the secret clause, which Charles revealed only to the Catholics Arlington and Clifford, the English king was to declare himself a Catholic ‘as soon as the welfare of the realm would permit’, and Louis was to earmark 6,000 French soldiers to help turn England Catholic.

  This was extraordinarily risky behaviour on the part of Charles. Lord Shaftesbury (as Anthony Ashley Cooper became in 1672), who was the leading political personality of the day and Charles’s current lord chancellor, was already very doubtful about the king. As an intemperate ex-Cromwellian, indeed a former member of the religious Barebones Parliament, he was waiting to pounce on any tyrannous royal behaviour. For Shaftesbury, an ambitious, passionate, ruthless character and a vituperative orator, the king was back on sufferance.

  As with many of his followers, Shaftesbury’s visceral hatred of absolutism and Catholicism, incarnate in the figure of the continental tyrant Louis XIV, had been forged by the great political struggles of the previous half-century. Intellectual justification for the need for continuous revolt was provided by his friend and personal physician, the political philosopher John Locke, whose contract theory of civil government would inspire the American colonies to rebel a hundred years later. Shaftesbury’s followers, the Puritan or country party as they were known in contrast to Charles II’s court party, had many links to Dissent and its manufacturing interests. The Dissenters saw not only a threat to freedom of thought but a customs threat to English trade in the stranglehold the bellicose Louis XIV had over so many continental ports.

  If Shaftesbury and others had begun to pick up rumours about the secret clause, their suspicions were exacerbated just before the war began against the Dutch. In 1672, as a first step in the implementation of the secret clause, Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence. Without Parliament’s approval he suspended all the penal laws against Roman Catholics and Dissenters, exhibiting that old Stuart tendency to dispense with Parliamentary procedures which the country had fought a war to stop. The House of Commons was so outraged that in February 1673 it refused to vote supplies until the Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn. The following month Charles gave in and withdrew the Indulgence. But, though the Commons voted supplies for the war, it also quickly passed a Test Act to root out Catholics. The Test Act required all office holders to swear that they rejected the doctrines of the Roman Church and to prove that they had recently received Anglican Communion. Charles angrily prorogued Parliament, but the damage was done. For the Duke of York, the future James II, was obliged to resign as lord high admiral. Arlington and Clifford had to go too.

  These resignations were followed a few months later by Shaftesbury’s dismissal as lord chancellor. For the rest of Charles II’s reign the country was racked by a long-drawn-out struggle between the cadaverous Shaftesbury, whose opposition party stood for limiting the king’s power, and Charles II and his court party. From the end of 1673 the king’s party were led by the Cavalier Anglican Thomas Osborne, like Shaftesbury a skilled Commons organizer who did not scruple to buy support when all else failed, and was said to set aside £20,000 a year from customs receipts to bribe MPs. Created Earl of Danby, Osborne was as determined to uphold the royal prerogative and eradicate Dissent as Shaftesbury was to pursue the will of Parliament and establish toleration. Thus for the first time in English history there emerged two distinct parties in the House of Commons, from which derive our present-day two-party system.

  Under pressure from the increasingly anti-French House of Commons Charles was forced to make peace with Holland in 1674 and the Third Dutch War came to an end. As early as 1677 Danby, Charles II’s new chief minister after the demise of the Cabal, was raising an English army to help the Dutch and arranging the marriage of James’s daughter Princess Mary, heiress presumptive to the English throne because Charles II was childless, to Charles’s nephew William III of Orange, stadholder of the Netherlands. The marriage took place in November. Louis XIV was incandescent at the way Charles had failed to prevent Danby returning to the principles of the Triple Alliance, because he had been sending his cousin further enormous secret subsidies in return for the promise that England would make no alliance with a foreign power without France’s permission.

  By now Louis had had enough–his policy of bribing Charles had got nowhere. He decided to turn his attentions to the opposition under Shaftesbury and bribe them instead. This of course could not have been more dangerous to Charles II. Louis revealed to Shaftesbury the second and third secret agreements Charles had signed to prorogue or adjourn Parliament at the French king’s bidding for £100,000 a time to prevent Parliament declaring war on France. In July 1678, stymied by Danby’s threat of an English army defending Holland, Louis made peace with the Treaty of Nijmegen and not long afterwards revealed to Shaftesbury a fourth secret treaty, under which Charles had been paid to withdraw from the Dutch alliance and which had been written out in the reluctant Danby’s hand.

  From August 1678 events were anyway moving in Shaftesbury’s favour with the discovery of the supposed Popish Plot. Titus Oates, a moonfaced rogue clergyman, announced that there was a secret plot afoot for Catholics with French aid to embark on a massacre of Protestants, including the king and the Duke of York. Since the Duke of York was already a Catholic and the king could not have been more friendly to Roman Catholics, this was palpable nonsense. But the strange death of the examining magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey fired the ever smouldering embers of anti-Catholicism into furious life and it swept the country. Innocent Catholics were tried and found guilty on no evidence at all, and Shaftesbury saw his chance. He exploited fears that Protestantism was under threat to get Danby impeached for his activities as the king’s emissary to Louis, activities proven by his handwriting. In January 1679 Charles was forced to dissolve Parliament and call new elections to save Danby and to prevent himself being attacked on his French policy.

  However, the new Parliament which met in March was extremely hostile to Catholicism and to the Duke of York. Shaftesbury began to bay for the blood of the openly Catholic duke and for his exclusion from the throne. Defiantly, Charles dissolved Parliament and called fresh elections again in the hope of getting a better House, which would vote against Shaftesbury’s Exclusion Bill. On its last day Shaftesbury got the Habeas Corpus Act passed which prevented the crown from delaying trials and imprisoning without cause.

  Nevertheless, Charles was so alarmed by the new House of Commons that he refused to allow it to sit. The backers of the Exclusion Bill, Shaftesbury’s followers, petitioned the king to allow Parliament to meet. Their country party bec
ame known as the Petitioners, and soon they got the nickname the Whiggamores or Whigs because the Scots Covenanters with their Petition of 1638 had been called Whiggamores. Meanwhile the court party, formerly led by the imprisoned Danby, who expressed their abhorrence of Shaftesbury’s attempt to interfere with the royal prerogative, began to be known as Tories (from ‘Toraidhe’), which was the nickname used of Catholic rebels in Ireland.

  Parliament was champing at the bit, but the king continued to refuse to allow it to assemble. The situation in London began to turn distinctly nasty; there were mutterings about a new civil war. Rebellion broke out in both eastern and western Scotland when the Covenanters, who had been persecuted for almost twenty years, rose up and murdered the pro-English Archbishop Sharp near St Andrews. They were led by the son of the Argyll who had led the first Covenanters. Shaftesbury by now had plans, which were being widely discussed, for Charles’s illegitimate son, the showy and shallow Duke of Monmouth, to succeed as king instead of the Catholic James. Shaftesbury manoeuvred to get Monmouth sent north to put the Covenanters’ rising down, so that he might cover himself in glory. Monmouth did just that, defeating the Covenanters at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge near Glasgow, and they were then brutally punished by the Duke of York whom Charles had sent north to get out of harm’s way. Argyll was exiled from Scotland.

  Meanwhile Charles played a waiting game. It was not until October 1680 that Parliament was permitted to assemble, whereupon the Exclusion Bill passed in the Commons. The succession was saved by the Lords, which rejected the bill when Lord Halifax convinced his fellow peers that it was better to be like him, neither a Whig nor a Tory but a Trimmer between the two.

  Nevertheless, what is known as the Exclusion Crisis had not gone away. To prevent the emergence of a figurehead for the Whig cause Charles had sent Monmouth out of the country. Encouraged by the feeling of moderation in the air now that the reaction to the Popish Plot had died down, in January 1681 he dissolved Parliament and called a new one to meet in Oxford. There Shaftesbury would not have the sort of influence he did in London thanks to the London mob and a gang of apprentices called the Whiteboys. As Pym had done, he used this threat of street violence to intimidate MPs. The king meanwhile coolly began to negotiate with Louis once more for further income to save him from having to call Parliament again.