Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The ‘Happy Restoration’

  Some of the king's new subjects required more healing than others. Tens of thousands of men and women bore the physical and mental scars of what they had seen or had done to them – females as well as males. In 1640 a woman in Gloucestershire was ‘ravished’ by ‘eight several soldiers’ on their way to join the king's army; the colours of a royalist infantry company displayed a naked soldier with an unsheathed sword and an erect penis, together with the motto ‘Ready to use both’, and presumably many men did so; some depositions made after the Irish rebellion of 1641 described gang-rape in chilling detail (seven ‘rebells hadd ravished and had carnall knowledge of an English Protestant woman, one presently after another, soe as they gaue her not tyme to rise till the last act performed’). And so on.67 Tens of thousands of women also suffered the anguish of separation and some consulted astrologers such as William Lilly for reassurance. As Sir Keith Thomas has observed, ‘It is hard to think of a source which gives a more vivid indication of the human suffering caused by the Civil War’ than Lilly's neatly kept ledgers of advice given to distraught women desperate to know whether the absent soldiers they loved were alive or dead.68 Many saw their worst fears come true. So many men died in the wars that the number of English women who remained spinsters all their lives increased to almost one-quarter; while many others grieved as widows. Margaret Eure considered the loss of her husband – one of 23,000 English soldiers killed in combat in 1643 alone – ‘the greatest misfortune that could ever happen to me in this world’, because it meant ‘the death of the gallantest man that I ever knew in my life’. On hearing of her husband's death in a skirmish that same year, Lady Alice Moore described herself as ‘a wretched woman, desolate and distressed’, adding ‘I am not capable of receiving comfort myself in this dreadful extremity.‘69

  In the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, however, Charles II and his ‘Cavalier Parliament’ paid little attention to such personal issues and instead concentrated on turning the clock back to 1641. The insignia of the Republic were the first to go: its coat of arms and flags were removed from all public places; its coins were recalled and melted down; its warships were renamed; its monuments were smashed. The anniversary of the regicide, 30 January, replaced 3 September as a national holiday – and on the first one, in 1661, the corpses of Cromwell and other republican leaders were disinterred and strung up on the common gallows at Tyburn. By then, the courts had tried and punished perhaps 100 of their colleagues, restored the confiscated estates of some 800 English royalist landowners (summarily depriving those who had ‘usurped’ them during the Interregnum), and allowed a further 3,000 royalist families to buy back their sequestered property.

  Charles II thus honoured the first two promises contained in the Declaration of Breda – a general pardon and a resolution of property disputes – but he failed to persuade Parliament to approve the religious toleration he favoured. Instead, the assembly enacted measures ‘for preventing Dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants’ and penalized all who refused to ‘conform to the liturgy of the Church of England as it is now by law established’. Above all a ‘Test Act’ required all preachers, town magistrates and teachers at schools and universities, and later all peers and Members of Parliament, to take a ‘test’ on oath to demonstrate their orthodoxy. Those who refused – including perhaps 2,000 clerics who refused to accept the Book of Common Prayer – immediately lost their jobs. The Cavalier Parliament also renewed the Established Church's monopoly of legal worship: henceforth, fines awaited all who failed to attend their parish church each Sunday, all who attended a non-conformist meeting of five or more, and all officials who failed to enforce the law. Persistent non-conformists went to prison – including John Bunyan, who composed The Pilgrim's Progress (the most popular work of prose fiction in English written in the seventeenth century) during his 12 years in jail, and George Fox, the leading Quaker, who composed a best-selling autobiography during his long periods of incarceration. Neither work circulated in print for many years because another early measure of the Cavalier Parliament, the Licensing Act, prohibited the printing of any work in England without government permission. The publication of newspapers temporarily ceased and the spate of pamphlets became a trickle.70

  The Cavalier Parliament also restored to Charles II most of the powers exercised by his father. Although both the prerogative courts (whether secular, like Star Chamber, or ecclesiastical, like High Commission) and the regalian rights (like Ship Money) that had caused such controversy in the 1630s disappeared, the king gained sole control of the kingdom's armed forces (the dispute that had precipitated the Civil War); and, once Parliament obligingly revoked the Triennial Act in 1664, he could convene and dismiss assemblies as he pleased. Three years later, he also recovered the right to appoint and remove judges at will.71 Above all, Charles inherited the three principal taxes that had formed the mainstay of the republican regime – customs, excise and the assessment – and, as the English economy burgeoned, the yield of the first two revenue streams steadily increased, making the crown once again largely independent of Parliament in peacetime. Between 1679 and 1684 only 7 per cent of the crown's income came from parliamentary taxes – a quinquennium in which no Parliament sat – and between 1684 and 1688 the figure fell below 1 per cent.72 A return to ‘Personal Rule’ by the monarch seemed a distinct possibility.

  The Restoration in Scotland and Ireland took a different form – not least because Charles had been proclaimed king of both Scotland and Ireland in 1649, so the concessions contained in the ‘Declaration of Breda’ applied only to England. A small cadre in London therefore guided the Parliaments of both kingdoms through a Restoration process modelled on the measures passed by the Cavalier Parliament at Westminster. In Scotland, Charles restored the separate Parliament and judicial courts abolished by Cromwell; voided all legislation passed by his father's opponents; and (like his father) handpicked his Privy Councillors, who both implemented the policies decreed in London and named ‘the Articles’ (the committee that shepherded through Parliament all legislation desired by the king). A few leading Covenanters (including Argyll and Johnstone of Wariston) went to the scaffold for their role in bringing down the monarchy. In religious matters, Charles did not tamper with the traditional liturgy (the immediate cause of the revolution in 1637) but required all ministers to accept the authority of bishops (and deprived of their livings the 300 who refused). He also gained the right to maintain a considerable standing army, ready to stifle any opposition.

  In Ireland, Charles also restored the Parliament and legal system abolished by Cromwell – but otherwise did very little because, as his chief adviser, Edward Hyde (later Lord Clarendon), slyly realized while in exile: ‘Cromwell is no doubt very busy … [re-settling] that kingdom without opposition. And truly, if we can get it again, we shall find difficulties removed which a virtuous prince and more quiet times could never have compassed.‘73 Although after the Restoration a ‘Court of Claims’ heard petitions from those who had lost their lands, it reinstated few royalists. By contrast, almost 8,000 veterans of Cromwell's army and many civilian supporters of the Republic received confirmation of their titles to lands confiscated from the rebels; and every year, on 23 October, Protestant clerics delivered sermons to remind their congregations that, despite the massacres carried out on that day in 1641, the rebellion had failed and its perpetrators had received due punishment.

  The king changed even less in Anglo-America. Although, as in Britain and Ireland, orders went out to restore the ‘Established Church’, Charles instructed his officials in America ‘not to suffer any man to be molested or disquieted in the exercise of his religion’ and he showed little enthusiasm for hunting down even the regicides fled who had there (John Dixwell, William Goffe and Edward Whalley all eventually died of natural causes in Connecticut).74 He also continued the Republic's policy of populating the colonies with both African slaves and British criminals, political opponents and pa
upers; he reissued the Rump's Navigation Acts that protected the colonists from foreign competition. He retained and developed Jamaica, the Republic's sole Caribbean conquest from Spain.

  Nevertheless, the Restored Monarchy at first seemed precarious. In England the years 1661–2 saw a marked rise in deaths and fall in marriages and conceptions due to a poor harvest; 1665 witnessed a plague epidemic that killed perhaps a quarter of London's population; in 1666 a great fire destroyed most of the capital's historic centre; and in 1667 the Dutch, on whom Charles had rashly declared war, launched a surprise attack up the Thames, coming almost within sight of London, and then destroying several ships of the Royal Navy at anchor and taking its flagship home as a trophy. Samuel Pepys, who both as a Londoner and as Secretary of the Navy was well placed to judge the situation, reported that ‘never were people so dejected as they are in the City all over at this day; and do talk most loudly, even treason; as, that we are bought and sold – that we are betrayed by the papists and others about the king’. On 13 June 1667, fearing that the Dutch might attack London itself, Pepys sent his family, most of his money and his precious diaries ‘into the country’ for safety (noting that ‘hundreds’ of other Londoners now ‘remove their families and rich goods’ from the City).75

  The next decade was less restless, but in 1679 and 1680 part of England's political elite tried repeatedly to persuade Parliament to pass an act excluding from the succession Charles's brother and heir James, an open and devout Catholic whom some suspected of wanting to turn Britain into an absolute monarchy like ‘France, where the subjects are at the disposal of the king for life and limb, and to invade other nations’ property for the luxury of the Court; and little men of low fortunes are the ministers of state.’ Yet despite three general elections in two years (a record still unmatched in British history), Charles managed to avoid signing an Exclusion Bill into law. He also managed to rule without Parliament for the rest of his reign.76

  Thus Edward Sexby's proud boast in the Putney Debates of 1647 – ‘We have engaged in this kingdom, and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen’ (page 372 above) – had miscarried. Only the reckless behaviour of James, who became king when Charles died in February 1685, provided a second chance.

  The Glorious Revolution

  At first, the new monarch seemed secure on his throne. A few months after his accession, Charles's illegitimate Protestant son the duke of Monmouth invaded, but he attracted little support and James's troops swiftly defeated him (see chapter 17 below). Encouraged by this display of loyalty, James decided to reduce the size of the electorate to the English House of Commons (a process started by his late brother), and so to create a more manageable assembly. He pressured the nobles and gentry in each county to agree in advance on two ‘knights of the shire’ to represent them, and thus avoid a contested election. He then systematically revoked the charters of parliamentary boroughs then and reissued them in a form that allowed the crown to appoint – and remove – the officials who chose its members of Parliament. Any corporation that resisted incurred heavy legal costs (and, in the end, usually lost). At least 35 boroughs were ‘regulated’ (to use the king's terminology) between March and September 1688.

  James had an ulterior motive in modifying the franchise in this way: he was determined to repeal the ‘Test Acts’ that restricted all government posts in England to members of the Church of England. He therefore engaged in a practice known as ‘closeting’, in which he personally interviewed members of England's political elite to secure an undertaking that, when he next summoned Parliament, they would favour the election of men committed to repeal the Test Acts. He dismissed anyone who refused and replaced them with someone more compliant – often either Catholics or ‘Dissenters’ (Protestants who did not belong to the Church of England). Lords Lieutenants, justices of the peace and other prominent men throughout England lost offices that they and their families had held for generations: ‘Not since the Norman Conquest,’ wrote Sir John Plumb, ‘had the crown developed so sustained an attack on the established political power of the aristocracy and major gentry.‘77

  Because the ‘attack’ involved several thousand individuals, it took longer than James had anticipated and in April 1688 he decided to act. Instead of summoning a Parliament, he used his prerogative powers to issue a ‘Declaration of Indulgence’. In it, the king declared that ‘all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical’ were now suspended and that all his subjects might ‘meet and serve God after their own way or manner’. Catholics, Quakers, Jews and all other religious groups would now enjoy the same freedoms as Anglicans. Moreover – and here lay the fatal flaw – James required all members of the Anglican clergy to read out his Declaration from their pulpits on two successive Sundays.78

  Just before the first day appointed for the public reading, seven bishops (including the archbishop of Canterbury) presented a petition to the king stating that they could not comply because no English king had the unilateral power to suspend a parliamentary statute (namely the Test Acts). Only Parliament could do that. James responded by charging the seven bishops with ‘seditious libel’. Given the subject matter, the ensuing trial of the bishops almost inevitably led to a discussion of the limits of royal power and, like his grandfather James I when confronted by a cleric who protested on ground of conscience (page 326 above), James II would discover the folly of submitting such matters to public debate. ‘I do not remember in any case in all our law,’ one judge observed on the last day of the trial, in which the king had overridden a law enacted in Parliament. Moreover, ‘I can see no difference, nor know of one in law, between the king's power to dispense with laws ecclesiastical and his power to dispense with any other laws whatsoever. If this be once allowed of, there will need no Parliament; all the legislature will be in the King.‘79 After deliberating all night, on 10 July 1688 the jury declared the bishops ‘Not Guilty’ and they emerged to a tumultuous welcome.

  That same day, a group of seven peers sent a letter inviting James's son-in-law, Prince William of Orange, to invade England in ‘such a strength’ that it ‘were able to defend themselves’ against James's army and navy if attacked. Like their predecessors who in 1640 had promised widespread support for a Scottish invasion (see page 341 above), the peers assured William that ‘there are nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the kingdom who are desirous of a change’ of regime, and urged him ‘to venture upon the attempt’ before the end of the year.80 Unlike the petition by the seven bishops, the invitation of the seven peers was manifestly treason: they had called on a foreign power to invade and overthrow their anointed king.

  In logistical terms, expecting that a powerful amphibious expedition requested in mid-July could arrive before the end of the campaigning season was totally unrealistic; and any amphibious expedition in winter involved a high risk of disruption or damage from storms. Moreover, even if the prince managed to evade the Royal Navy and land his forces, James had some 40,000 troops with which to oppose them; and, even should William secure a bridgehead, as a shrewd English observer noted, ‘it's well known he cannot stay long here without a manifest exposing of his own countrey to the French’.81 Nevertheless, by a combination of good logistics and good luck, on 5 November (15 November by the Gregorian calendar), 500 Dutch ships arrived off the Devon coast and the prince, his 23,000 veteran troops, 5,000 horses and artillery train began to disembark.

  Contrary to the assurances of the seven peers, scarcely one nobleman in ten provided William with active support as he marched on London, but he also encountered remarkably little opposition. Eventually deserters, including even James's second daughter Anne and her husband, joined the prince and undermined James's ability and will to resist; and, just before Christmas, a detachment of Dutch troops discreetly ‘escorted’ James from his London palace, creating an Interregnum for the second time in a generation in England (whose Parliament determined that James had abdicated) and S
cotland (where he was declared deposed).

  The political situation in the winter of 1688–9 was similar to that in the winter of 1641–2: the anointed king had fled, and although his opponents mostly agreed that they did not want him back, they remained divided on what they wanted to place in his stead. But whereas ‘King Pym’ had only the London Trained Bands to rely on, Prince William placed all the key points in London and the Home Counties under the control of his veteran troops – most of them Dutch, assisted by some of the Danish, German, English and Scots units that normally served in the Dutch Army. They remained there for more than a year while he persuaded those who had invited him over, and their allies, to make him their sovereign – a step none of them had intended. William refused to talk with those who ‘would have a duke of Venice’ (just like Charles I before him); while to those who wanted to make his wife Mary (James's eldest daughter) their sole sovereign, he replied that he ‘would not like to be his wife's gentleman usher’. Therefore in February 1689 William and Mary accepted an invitation from a ‘Convention’ of peers and commoners to become joint sovereigns in England. In return – indeed, in the same document – they promised to redress specified grievances (such as recognition that ‘suspending the laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of Parliament, is illegal’) and also to guarantee certain ‘liberties’.82