Clarendon should have been the more powerful of the two. It was not Ashley Cooper’s Cabal influence that began to dislodge him but the intrigues of the King’s mistresses for whom the serious Clarendon had scant regard. Furthermore, he never understood the complexities and the importance of managing Parliament, and the need to build a political base among the old guard of Parliamentarians and Royalists. He had been blamed when the Thames froze over during the winter following the Great Fire of London, 1666. And so when the Dutch sailed up the Medway to draw to an end the disastrously managed war with them in 1667, it may not have been Clarendon’s fault, but he took the blame.
What could not be slain was the dragon of suspicion that Catholicism was attempting to gain hold of the King and country. It wasn’t just continuing paranoia. Charles clearly believed that if a gentleman wanted to be religious, then Rome was a more satisfying persuasion than most. And his wife, Catherine of Braganza, was a Portuguese Princess and a Catholic. His brother James, the Duke of York, was a convert to Catholicism, and because Catherine had not given birth, James was next in line for the throne.
There was also a treaty negotiated in secret with Louis XIV of France. It was called the Treaty of Dover. It provided England with a much-needed bolster to Charles’s Treasury and Louis with a promise that England would help him in a third war against the Dutch. Within that treaty there was a secret clause which was not published at the time. That clause was the most damning. It said: ‘The King of Great Britain, being convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith, is determined to declare himself a Catholic as soon as the welfare of his realm will permit.’ In 1673, the King was forced to sign a Test Act; as the title of the legislation suggests, this was the law to test the religious persuasion of any person who held office in the service of the monarch. A soldier, for example, could be called upon under the Act to swear not simply his allegiance, but to swear also his disbelief in transubstantiation – the Catholic assertion that the consecrated bread and wine at Holy Communion or Mass are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. A declaration of disbelief was, obviously, a total denial of Rome. This 1673 Test Act went a great way towards destroying the Cabal of senior ministers.
But what about James, Duke of York? His wife Anne, the daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, and a Protestant, was dead, and the Duke, a Catholic convert, had married a Catholic, Princess Mary of Modena. He was Charles II’s heir and Lord High Admiral. He refused to take the Test and therefore resigned his post as Lord High Admiral. Yet James was very likely to become King. If he refused to sign the Test, it meant that whatever the circumstances he would refuse to give up his Catholic faith and therefore Britain would have a Catholic monarch – an unthinkable proposition for the nation, or at least for those who actually governed. So it was at this point that those who really held power, and who held it not necessarily as staunch Protestants but certainly as staunch anti-Catholics, knew that a Protestant monarch would have to be found. However, there were many important Catholics willing to go to extremes to secure a Catholic monarch. Religious conflict wasn’t simply something that started with the Puritans and the Royalists. Who was and who wasn’t a Catholic, for example, had tormented political reformers for at least five monarchs and one dictator. In the late 1670s there had been allegations of a papist plot to kill the King. Charles’s Catholic wife was vulnerable to the charge that she was involved against him, but she was not. The plotters planned to replace Charles with his Catholic brother, James, Duke of York. Here lay the continuing fear of Roman Catholicism, which extended beyond religious matters to continuing suspicions that the Catholic French would attempt to unseat the monarch. On top of this was the failure of Charles’s court to produce a great statesman, a wise administrator. Thus the pervading fear of Catholicism and the argument about whether the monarch should or should not be a Catholic continued without any much needed attempt to control the rights of the monarch and confrontation between two political groupings.
On one side was the first Earl of Danby who had been the King’s minister and who used his influence (and bribes) to build what was called the Court Party. On the other was Shaftesbury, a sometime Cromwellian and also, separately, Lord Chancellor to Charles; he was led the emerging Country Party. Shaftesbury believed there should be a free Parliament, free that is, from the Crown. He was against standing armies, which he rightly feared could take over the country. He also wanted religious tolerance without which, he said, there could be little chance of political stability.
Between 1679 and 1681 Shaftesbury and his Country supporters organized petitions and fought three elections. The campaign was intense and the Parliamentary grouping was well organized. And this organization changed the nature of politics completely. Shaftesbury had, in effect, started the first political party in English history: the Whigs, as the Country party became known. And the gentry of the Court party, the opposition to the Whigs, became known as the Tories.
Whiggamores were the miserable money-minded Scots who had marched on Edinburgh just a few years earlier. One hundred years later Samuel Johnson remarked that he had always thought the first Whig was the devil. So ‘Whig’ was a pejorative term. ‘Tory’ came from the Irish word, Toraidhe, for a small-brained and ugly outlaw or robber dispossessed by the Anglo-Irish. So both sides adopted scathing descriptions with not a little humour and indeed some pride. More importantly, here for the first time, Parliament was divided into political parties. The Whigs and the Tories had arrived.37
Shaftesbury’s Whigs, or members of the Country Party as they were still more formally known, were formed to exclude James from the throne in a Bill appropriately named, the Exclusion Bill. There were in fact, three Bills. In 1679 Parliament was dissolved on the second reading of the first Bill. In 1680 the Lords rejected the second Bill. In 1681 the third Bill fell when the King dissolved the Parliament at Oxford. The supporters of the Bills were hardly as one; some Members took up violent tactics and could not agree on who should rule if not James. Some wanted James’s daughter Mary, who was, in spite of her father’s conversion, a Protestant; others wanted Charles’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth. Moreover, Parliament could be dissolved and summoned more or less at the King’s pleasure. This, and Charles’s in-built majority in the Lords, meant that the Exclusion Bills were never likely to get through. The most important personal mistake made by Shaftesbury and his Whigs was their inability to understand that Charles would never give in on what he thought was a point of principle: that he ruled by Divine Right. And in this the country supported the King and not Shaftesbury.
Meanwhile, the King’s senior adviser had fallen. The man Charles had come to rely upon, Danby, was a schemer who relied on bribery and patronage, rather than an innate sense of chancellorship. Danby had managed to get an agreement for the marriage of Mary, the daughter of James, Duke of York, to William of Orange. For the moment, because he had been exposed while trying to get a bribe from the French and Dutch in return for getting a British signature on a European treaty, he had to be sacrificed and sent to the Tower. His crime was hardly one to threaten his head and indeed he later returned as minister to William of Orange.
None of this was of much interest to Charles’s subjects. They had more mundane difficulties. In one week in 1665, more than 7,000 people died in London. Most of those people, including their physicians, died of bubonic plague. Twelve months later, to the very week, almost 14,000 houses burned to the ground. The Great Plague and the Great Fire have often been linked. It is said that the fire destroyed the plague – or its source – and so saved further misery. It is a convenient hypothesis, but it’s one that doesn’t stand up. Of course, London knew all about plagues. It had suffered them for more than three centuries since the Black Death. The plague had simply never gone away. It was said that the carriers were not rats but soldiers, whose dirty coats and linen were infested with the plague flea. When the fire started, it was a convenient sign that the plague might literally burn out. In less than five
days the City of London, between the Tower and the Temple, was destroyed. And the bubonic plague died out. But it is unlikely that the fire destroyed the plague because, by 1666, the epidemic was already almost played out. The breeding ground was the slum area beyond the City walls and this wasn’t much touched by the fire, and therefore wasn’t rebuilt. Undoubtedly the change in building style that followed the fire (from wood to brick and from straw floors to carpets) helped, although there’s no evidence of any radical change in hygiene.
What the fire most certainly did, apart from destroying eighty-eight churches and St Paul’s Cathedral, was to give Londoners the chance to change the shape of their city. It was a maze of crooked streets and alleys with more twists and turns than the mind of the most devious courtier. But, despite the fact that this was the age of Christopher Wren, the City remained unchanged. Wren planned a new City of London but London didn’t want to be replanned. So Wren and centuries of his admirers had to be satisfied with a commission to build fifty-one churches and, of course, the new great Cathedral of St Paul’s. Wren didn’t start his professional life as an architect. He was born in the year the painter Anthony van Dyck came to live in England, 1632. He first studied mathematics, which led to astronomy, and by the time he was twenty-eight he was Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University. The inscription over the north door at St Paul’s is said to have been written by his son: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – If you would see his monument, look around.
As the great cubes of Portland stone began to be shipped from the Dorset quarries for Wren’s buildings, so there was an even more urgent sort of construction taking place: ship building. While London had struggled with the plague and then with the fire, Charles II and his ministers had sent England to war. As London buried its dead, the admirals and sea generals fought the Dutch. They fought them in the Far East over possessions and the lucrative spice trades. They fought them off West Africa as trade was used to grab possessions. At home, they fought them off Lowestoft with a victory down to English artillerymen rather than good sea tactics. In June 1666 when the Dutch and British fleets engaged off North Foreland, the sound of battle reached London. This time the Dutch were the victors but within two months the fleet was refitted, put to sea and triumphed. But the war was not at an end. The French joined in, and it became clear that the once-superior Royal Navy could not protect the islands. It was time to sue for peace, especially as the Dutch sailed up the Thames estuary and the Medway and captured the King’s battleship, the Royal Charles – the very ship (but then called the Naseby) that had brought Charles II back from exile in 1660. But peace came and with it a new city was christened: it had been laid out by the Dutch who ceded some of their New World territory to Charles. The city had been called New Amsterdam but Charles renamed it after his brother, the Duke of York.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
1682–5
The Restoration period is for many summed up in the often saucy scenes from Restoration comedy – the men powdered and beauty-spotted, the women flighty and full-bosomed. And if, as seems likely, Restoration comedy reflected life under the Merry Monarch, how are two of the most important works of all time, Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress, explained?
In the early years of the seventeenth century, writers saw Godliness as a text. Political writers referred to God’s involvement in everyday life. But by the closing years of the century, the Church of England was no longer able to make people members of it by the force of law. The Church of England came to be regarded as spiritually impotent and literature, especially the literature of political thought, reflected this.
During the seventeenth century thinkers, intellectuals, became preoccupied with the question of the boundaries of the Church and the State. John Milton saw God leading his people through the conflicts of the 1650s and then abandoning them in the 1660s – the Restoration. In 1658, the year Cromwell died, Milton started to write Paradise Lost in which the common man is allowed to fall to evil. By the time he wrote Samson Agonistes (1671), he was preoccupied with man’s failure to use his God-given gifts. The Republicans were Samsons, distracted and failing to do God’s good works. And when Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – the search for salvation – appeared in 1678, there was an emerging belief in a God whose text was less mysterious. Preachers searched the congregations more for goodliness, for kindliness and for tolerance, and less for transformation.
But when Charles returned to England, he wanted to settle the religious question. He wanted to restore the Church of England. Charles had no theological conviction, simply a sense of history, and in order to achieve religious tolerance he offered to make some of the moderate Puritans bishops. In October 1660, his Worcester House Declaration was a stopgap arrangement which weakened the power of the bishops and made some of the Book of Common Prayer optional – a sort of early Alternative Service Book. For eighteen months Charles tried to convince the Anglican majority in the Cavalier Parliament, but Charles’s religious reformation appeared doomed. The King’s hope now rested with his closest adviser, Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon – whose daughter Anne (1637–1771) was the first wife of James, the future king. Clarendon’s name, by his right as chief minister, entitled the Acts of Parliament (the Clarendon Code) that confirmed the established Church, the Anglican Communion over the non-conformists and certainly the Catholics. Yet Clarendon was reluctant to endorse this legislation. He would have preferred to avoid the direct breach in the different Churches. The Code finished any chance there had been of ecumenism. The Prayer Book Act left nothing to chance. Its draughtsmanship was a model of uncompromising recognition of an Established Church which left no room for dissenters to remain within the Anglican communion. There could be no excuse allowed. Furthermore, the Act ordered the parishioners themselves to be responsible for making sure that the Prayer Book was available, and paid for, in every church – including the Church in Wales. Inevitably, the Prayer Book was to be used to promote English as the tongue of the Welsh people.
Article 22 of the Prayer Book Act, gave direct instructions for the Book’s display and use:
A true printed copy of the said book entitled the Book of Common Prayer, shall at the cost and charges of the parishioners of every parish church and chapelry, cathedral church, college and hall, be attained and gotten before the Feast Day of Saint Bartholomew in the year of our Lord, 1662, upon pain of a forfeiture of £3 by the month for so long time as they shall then after be unproved thereof, by every parish or chapelry, cathedral church, college and hall remain default therein.
Behind Charles’s hope for religious tolerance was something of his need to protect himself politically. Whereas the Puritans in his father’s time were protected by Parliament, the Non-conformists now needed protection from Parliament, and the King was the person to do that. The legislation upset religious groupings, which upset political stability. Furthermore, Charles didn’t have a political agenda. Consequently his ambition, perhaps very simply put, was for a quiet life. Also, although not a Catholic (until, possibly, his deathbed) he was inclined to Catholicism. Imagine the political upheaval if he’d converted to Rome during his reign, instead of during his final hours. It was this combination of a King without a vision, yet with a belief in his Divine Right to rule, that produced an outward appearance of tolerance. It was a curious combination in a century full of anything but tolerant political systems, institutions and professions.
In the mid-seventeenth century a triad of professions – the priests, the physicians and the lawyers – kept their knowledge firmly under lock and key. The Latin of their textbooks helped maintain the mystery. But Nicholas Culpeper (1616–64) had noted, ‘The Liberty of our Commonwealth is most impaired by three sorts of men, priests, physicians and lawyers,’ and was determined to change this. Culpeper was a radical and a Republican and his translation of one of the medical mysteries, the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, was made in protest against the withholding of knowledge. Culpeper and many like-minded men were re
flecting a suspicion, even a hostility, that existed in the lower classes of British society. The physicians especially were protected by monarchs and so when, during the Republic, Culpeper feared the return of the monarchy, it is likely that his ideas had much support among those of the same persuasion. And just imagine how easy it was for people, without the tongue of learning, Latin, to believe Culpeper’s view that this language was the mark of a conspiracy much deeper and more sinister than even the mark of breeding, which he loathed. Thus, one consequence of Culpeper’s translation of the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis was the growth of physicians without professional qualification – something that was illegal before 1640 but encouraged in the atmosphere of Republican revolution. As one critic remarked, by the Restoration, ‘Stocking weavers, shoemakers, millers, masons, carpenters, bricklayers, gunsmiths, porters, butlers etc., are admitted to teach and write physic.’ And George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, reflected ‘whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of things’. Yet Fox had no medical training, simply inspiration. And Fox is a good enough example of the many who were attempting to do for religion what Culpeper had tried to do for medicine. Fox, who when imprisoned for blasphemy told the judge to ‘quake at the word of the Lord’ (so giving the Quakers their name), wanted medicine and religion to shake off their mysteries.
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