The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  When Parliament met in Oxford in late March, so defiant were the Whigs and so belligerent was their mood that they attended with armed soldiers–as did the king. For a moment England again trembled on the brink of civil war. And once again the cry went up in the Oxford Parliament to exclude the Duke of York from the throne, even though the Royal Council was now suggesting a regency during his lifetime: Princess Mary would rule for him followed by Anne.

  When the Whigs refused to accept this, Charles cunningly dissolved Parliament one last time–he never called a Parliament again. There was a real possibility that, had Parliament remained sitting, a new civil war would have begun or a Whig revolution have taken place. But the Whig leaders had lost their chance. Without a Parliament to attend, MPs drifted away, and the moment had passed. Two months later Shaftesbury was hauled before a Grand Jury in London for inciting revolution, but the Londoners trying him were all Whigs and the charges were dismissed. Amid great rejoicing, Shaftesbury was released. He fled to the Hague in Holland with Monmouth, but died there in poor health a few weeks later.

  What was called the Tory reaction then began. It was aided by the discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683, a conspiracy by a handful of Whig extremists, most of whom were former Cromwellian soldiers, to assassinate Charles as he rode past an inn named Rye House on the road between London and Newmarket. Even though the plot was the work of fanatics, Charles used it as an excuse to overthrow the last of the Whig leaders. On very flimsy grounds he executed two aristocrats from distinguished families, Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, neither of whom were probably involved with the plot but who had been among the chief movers in the Exclusion Crisis.

  Sidney, who had served on Cromwell’s Council of State, was killed for having in his possession papers supporting tyrannicide, while Russell died for refusing to agree that it was wrong to resist tyranny. These doctrines were the essence of what the Civil War had been fought for, and were considered reasonable ideas by many aristocratic Whig families who had fought for the Puritan Parliamentary cause. Thus Charles II by the end of his reign had considerably alienated many magnates as well as MPs. Sidney and Russell were seen by the Whigs as martyrs to the cause of civil liberty. As will be seen, their relations were only temporarily quiescent. They would take their revenge in the next reign.

  For the last two years of his life the king was triumphant. In the period known as his despotism, he set out to remodel the machinery by which Parliament was elected, in order to give the Tories a majority. He recalled all the royal charters of town corporations, which were where the Whig strength lay (the Tories were in the counties), and restored them only after a new corporation of Tories had been nominated to take the place of the old. He even invented a royal right of confirming all elections to the corporations. No one dared gainsay him. All the plots and death threats against him had given him a new popularity. James, Duke of York was restored to the Privy Council and to the Admiralty in defiance of the Test Act; Dissenters and Whigs were imprisoned, and Danby released.

  In a final climax to Charles’s sweeping the board, he failed to summon Parliament–in contravention of the Triennial Act of 1641, which laid down that Parliament had to be called every three years. Warning bells began to ring, even for his supporters. Halifax was especially disappointed by the king.

  However, the strain of asserting himself, and of conducting his energetic love life, finally told: the king was quite unexpectedly laid low by a stroke in February 1685, aged only fifty-eight. While he lingered, apologizing with his usual elegant wit for being ‘an unconscionable time dying’, Father Huddleston, a Catholic priest who had been present in one of the Catholic houses when Charles was on the run after the Battle of Worcester, was smuggled in up the backstairs of the Palace of Whitehall. Brought by the Duke of York, he gave the king the Last Rites according to the Catholic faith. From being a homeless exile Charles II had come home in triumph, and he now died in his own splendid bed, incontrovertibly a powerful monarch. His last words characteristically did not concern affairs of state. ‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ he said, and then expired.

  Despite the arbitrary style of his last years, Charles II’s reign had seen the beginning of the two-party system and the further development of Parliamentary government. Danby’s impeachment had finally established the responsibility of ministers to Parliament. By a mixture of tolerance and laziness Charles managed to heal the terrible wounds of the Civil War, and that was no mean feat. However, despite the growth of the colonies, his reign was not very illustrious. Charles’s links to France meant that by her inaction England helped the spread of a power which posed a genuine threat to the religious and civil liberty of Europe. His reign, which had begun in hope, ended in the triumph at home of a cynical absolutism not unlike that practised by the Sun King himself. It would lead to a new revolution to curb the Stuart kings’ power once and for all.

  The younger Buckingham made up a verse which delighted Charles II:

  We have a pretty, witty king,

  Whose word no one relies on,

  Who never said a foolish thing

  Nor ever did a wise one.

  Three hundred years later, that still seems to be the last word.

  James II (1685–1688)

  The Tory reaction enabled James II to become king without a murmur of protest. Parliament voted him the enormous sum of £1,900,000 a year for life, which gives a good indication of how popular he was. But though he was brave and hard working and led a quiet private life with his second wife, the Catholic Mary of Modena, James was almost as disastrous a king as his father Charles I, from whom he inherited some unfortunate character traits, being both obstinate and extraordinarily unrealistic. During James’s reign all the anxieties about papistry and absolutism that had amounted to a call to arms for seventeenth-century Englishmen once more came to the fore. He owed his accession to the support of the Anglican Tory party. The moment he made it clear that he planned to turn England into a Catholic country, and a Catholic country that fulfilled everyone’s worst fears, his cause was lost.

  James indicated the way he was heading right at the beginning of his reign, but such was the feeling against the Whigs that at first it made no difference. Though he was crowned in Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft under the Protestant Rite, on the second Sunday of the new reign the king attended Mass openly at Whitehall, with the chapel doors pushed wide so that all could see what he was doing. Pro-Catholic measures followed, including a warning to the bishops that the king would not have the clergy preaching against the dangers of papistry. And although he did not need the money, James II too became Louis XIV’s pensioner, for the Sun King hoped to repeat his trick of neutralizing Britain for the coming struggle.

  By the summer of 1685 the Whig exiles in Holland were in despair. The Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll decided to try and raise a revolution before James became too entrenched. Argyll crossed to Scotland to his own lands, while Monmouth went to the west country, where he proclaimed himself the lawful son of Charles II and the real king of England. Both risings failed, Monmouth being defeated and captured at the Battle of Sedgemoor in the New Forest. Hundreds of Monmouth’s supporters were executed (most of them hung, drawn and quartered) in the famously punitive Bloody Assizes, presided over by the lord chief justice Judge Jeffreys. Hundreds more were sentenced to transportation to the West Indies.

  James seized the opportunity Monmouth’s rebellion offered to create a Catholic standing army loyal only to him. Using the excuse that the militia was not good enough, he raised new regiments officered by Roman Catholics to protect him against what appeared to be incipient revolution, and would not disband them. By October 1685 the king’s army of 16,000 men was exercising menacingly just outside London on Hounslow Heath. With this large force at his disposal James was in a better position to see his wishes carried out in Parliament. He asked for the Test Act to be abolished, for he saw no reason why his fellow Catholics should be
prevented from holding office. But Parliament refused, believing that with a Roman Catholic king it was more important than ever that the Test Act remained in place. When MPs denounced his use of dispensing powers to appoint Catholic officers, James prorogued his one and only Parliament. He also dismissed all his Tory ministers except for the cynical and unprincipled opportunist Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, who quickly converted to Catholicism.

  Over the next two years matters went from bad to worse. In July 1686 James illegally established a Court of Ecclesiastical Commission presided over by his new lord chancellor Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge, which was to suppress clerical opposition and Romanize the Church. Henry Compton, the outspoken Bishop of London who protested against this, was suspended by the king. Judges installed during the triumph of Charles II declared that James had the power to dispense with the law if he wished and appoint Roman Catholics to state office. In case after case the king took enthusiastic advantage of this ruling, filling Oxford and Cambridge with Catholics introducing four Catholic peers into the Privy Council. In April 1687 by a Declaration of Indulgence James suspended all laws against Catholics and Dissenters, hoping to win some of the Dissenters on to his side. But, although the Dissenters had been persecuted by the Anglican Church, they infinitely preferred Protestantism to Catholicism and were not wooed.

  There was now a general feeling in the air that matters were approaching a crisis. Senior Tories like Danby now united with the exiled Whigs and conspired to find a new ruler. The obvious choice was Princess Mary, the heir to the throne, a staunch Protestant who was married to William III of Orange. Through a variety of means William, a valiant foe of Louis XIV, had made his opposition to the repeal of the Test Act and to the defeat of Protestantism quite clear. Meetings with the Dutch ambassador started secret negotiations for the Stadholder to come and save England from James II. The sense that Protestantism was in danger had been amplified by the arrival in England of the French Protestants, the Huguenots, 400,000 of whom had been expelled from France by Louis XIV over the previous two years, following his revocation of his ancestor’s Edict of Nantes. All over England people thrilled with horror as French exiles told of their hideous experiences at the hands of the Catholic Louis, and the spectre of their own houses being demolished and churches burned began to hang over the nation.

  In June 1688 events started moving towards their climax. The catalyst came with James’s second Declaration of Indulgence. This was to be read in all churches on the first two Sundays of that month. At this the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, the saintly and easygoing old man who had crowned James king, could bear it no longer. With six other bishops, he petitioned the king not to make the clergy break the law. Infuriated when the majority of the clergy duly refused to read the Declaration from the pulpit, James charged the bishops with seditious libel and sent them to the Tower. Scandalized, the English were convinced that their Protestant institutions and liberties were about to be overturned. As the bishops approached the Tower in their barge, crowds gathered to watch and shouted for their blessing.

  Princess Anne wrote to her sister Mary Archbishop of Canterbury, in Holland that ‘things are come to that pass now, that if they go on much longer, I believe no Protestant will be able to live’. She added, ‘I am resolved to undergo anything rather than change my religion; nay if it come to that, I had rather live on alms than change.’ The spectacle of such key establishment figures as six English bishops on trial was an affront to the English way of life. Nevertheless the country stayed reasonably calm because James’s two daughters remained staunch Protestants. There was no reason to doubt that in due course a Protestant queen would reverse her father’s acts.

  But now, to add urgency to their deliberations, Mary of Modena, James II’s second wife whose previous children had died in infancy, gave birth to a son, a new Prince of Wales. The prospect of another Catholic king to follow his ageing father was insupportable. The almost miraculous birth after a long gap aroused a great deal of suspicion about the origins of the baby–a rumour went round that it had been smuggled into Mary’s bedroom in a warming pan. (As a consequence of this damaging uncertainty, until quite recently the home secretary has had to be in the vicinity of the birth of the heir to the throne, in order to certify that the infant was not a substitute.)

  There was no time to lose. On 30 June, the day a London jury acquitted the bishops to wild rejoicings, a fateful letter was taken to William of Orange, inviting him to save England from tyranny and Roman Catholicism. He would have to bring an army strong enough to oppose James and secure elections to a free Parliament. It was signed by seven men of all political persuasions and from different parts of the kingdom. They had thousands more at their back, in the armed forces, in the shires, in the Church, in the absent Parliament, all united by their belief that the liberties guaranteed by English Protestantism were in danger of vanishing altogether under James. Among the signatories were the Tory leader Danby, once the Whigs’ most bitter enemy; Compton, the suspended Bishop of London; a Russell and a Sidney, both of whom were closely related to the Whig martyrs of Charles II’s reign; and the wealthy Whig magnate the Earl of Devonshire, who was related to the Russells by marriage.

  William III had dedicated his life to preserving his country from the French–he could not ignore an invitation which would add England to the coalition against Louis XIV. What was later described as a Protestant east wind blew William and his fleet down the Channel past where James had the English fleet waiting for him, so that not a shot was fired against the future king.

  William of Orange landed at Torbay in Devon on the symbolically Protestant date of 5 November, the day the Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament had been discovered. From Torbay the stadholder marched unopposed through the west of England towards the capital. He had a large army with him of 15,000 men–about 4,000 of whom were English soldiers lent to the Dutch. Fortunately almost all England, from the lords lieutenant down to the armed services, were in agreement with his coming, ‘to give assistance this year sufficient for a relief under these circumstances which have now been represented’, in the words of the note which invited him. All the western grandees came out to meet him as he headed for London, and the crowds swelled behind him.

  James rallied his army to meet William at Salisbury, but so many troops deserted that he dared not fight, and William proceeded slowly on to London. Even James’s most beloved soldier, John Churchill, who had been a member of his household for twenty years, abandoned him and joined William. So did his daughter Princess Anne. There was hardly any resistance at all, which is why 1688 is referred to as the bloodless revolution. The queen and the infant Prince of Wales, James Edward Stuart, were despatched to France. Having left a letter on his dressing table, reproaching his country for forsaking him, the king realized that the game was up. He threw the great seal of office into the Thames to make it difficult for the regime to sign any official documents and tried to follow his wife and son over to France. Embarrassingly, he was brought back by two English fishermen who had recognized him, but was then allowed to depart in peace by William.

  James’s flight cleared up a good many issues. The free election could be held without bloodshed, as there would be no clash of troops. The City of London, which was fast dissolving into chaos, was restored to order by William’s troops. In January 1689 the writs were sent out summoning a Parliament, which as at the Restoration was called a Convention, its purpose being to draw up the new royal settlement. There was a fundamental problem, however. Both Tories and Whigs had joined together in calling for the assistance of William of Orange, but their ultimate objectives were very different. The Tories still believed in the divine right of kings and wished to establish a regency: James II could remain king in name while Mary with William’s aid governed in fact. But the Whigs, as befitted their revolutionary origins, wished to abolish Divine Right once and for all. Their aim was to emphasize that the crown was subordinate to Parliamentar
y authority.

  But a regency would make James II and his son a perpetual rallying point for the disaffected. After much argument the Convention Parliament voted through the motion that by leaving for France James had abdicated and the throne was simply declared vacant. It issued a Declaration of Rights outlining James’s illegal acts; in order not to offend the Tories or Churchmen, no blame was attached to the king himself but was attributed to his ministers.

  Meanwhile the problem of the Tories’ theoretical anxieties about who should and who should not assume the throne were swept aside when William of Orange declared tersely that he had not come to England ‘to be his wife’s gentleman usher’. He would either be joint sovereign with her or he was going home to Holland. As the last thing anyone wanted now that William had arrived was for him to leave again, it was quickly agreed that he and his wife should be joint sovereigns. On 23 February William and Princess Mary accepted the throne they had been offered by Parliament and signed the Declaration of Rights.

  This was the grand finale in the great drama of the struggle between the Stuart kings and Parliament which had taken centre stage for so much of the seventeenth century. It laid the ground rules for the British constitutional monarchy. The Glorious Revolution of 1688, as it was ever after apotheosized, secured English Protestantism, which was now identified with the rights and liberties of the people against the attacks of a despotic Catholic king. Although two Stuarts still sat on the English throne, the monarchy not only had been created by Parliament but was responsible to it. The revolution marked the ultimate supremacy of Parliament over the Stuart belief that the royal prerogative was above the law. The king was at last no more than an official of the state who could be dismissed by the state. Divine Right, though still hankered after by the Tories, had been destroyed as a political concept. Parliament had triumphed over the crown.