The closed shop of the medical profession was controlled by the College of Physicians. In London, the college licensed just fifty physicians. In the countryside some boroughs paid for physicians but others, especially the poorer ones, turned to the apothecaries and white witches. Quacks they may have been, according to the College of Physicians, but cures they did make, with one exception. Surgery remained a mystery that could not be solved by the translation of a Latin text.
And what of the third member of the triad, the lawyers? The common law was rewritten in the seventeenth century. Relative peace meant that people had time to settle disputes, to trade, and to make claims of land and riches plundered in more violent times. And every claimant, every negotiator, needed a new style of contract and therefore a lawyer, and the rewritten common law often favoured commercial interests. Also delays and obfuscation favoured the rich and, of course, the lawyers. And there was no police force, so everything had to be proved by the lawyers and the official informer, the forerunner of the private detective.
The law became such a lucrative profession that a father was quite willing to spend £40 a year to send his son to one of the Inns of Court. As few had £40 a year, 90 per cent of law students were sons of gentlemen and peers.
So, in the closing years of Charles II’s reign, there was a clamouring for the reform of the practice of medicine, the law and the Church. Science soon reformed medicine but the law and the Church held their ground against reformation. However, the important point here is the rebellion itself.
And what of education? In the seventeenth century the two great universities were, largely, theological colleges and finishing schools for gentlemen. Yet the rebellion came because more people were thinking, writing, being read, followed and not so easily written off as eccentrics. However frightening to some, it is clear that Cromwell’s decade made certain that the intellectual radical was here to stay. Furthermore, the gay atmosphere of Restoration England was changing. Even the mood of the King himself was changing. The lazy, sometimes detached Charles became the protector of his great belief, the Divine Right of his dynasty to rule. It was a sober Charles II who emerged from the fear of another Civil War that followed the papist plot and the downfall of Danby. And while the King fought the anti-Catholic rising at home, his brother watched from a distance, in exile, knowing that little would induce the King to betray the succession. Charles believed it his sacred duty to pass the Crown to a brother whose virtues and whose vices alike rendered him, of all others, the man, as the King knew well, least fit to wear it.
Men voted against James, the Duke of York, becoming King as the Protestant tide again swept the country. Earnest and venerable divines tried to induce James to return to the Church of his fathers and his future subjects, but he remained obdurate. But his exile was short. In May 1682 James returned to England and the whole nation feared the coming to the throne of a Catholic monarch.
The following year another plot was discovered, real or otherwise, to assassinate the King. The story told was that the King and his brother, the Duke of York, loved horse racing. They planned to go to the races at Newmarket (followers of the turf will know that by 1683 Newmarket was well-established as a racecourse). The royal party would travel along the Newmarket Road and pass Rye House in Hertfordshire.
Either on their way there or on their way back (it’s not quite clear which) the bodyguard would be overpowered and the King done to death. But – and here’s another of history’s critical buts – there was a fire at Newmarket, and the royal racegoers left earlier than expected for London and arrived safely. The person who lived in Rye House was Hannibal Rumbold, a former Roundhead officer. Immediately suspects among the Whigs were arrested. One of them, Lord Howard, confessed. Another, the Earl of Essex (a title often found in court intrigue), committed suicide. Two other Whig leaders, Lord Russell and a prominent opponent of the monarchy, Algernon Sidney, were put on trial. The Whigs had tried convincing the people that the King was in danger of being assassinated by Catholics. Here now was a Whig-approved plot to have the monarch done away with. Russell and Sidney were executed. The importance of the manner of their death must not be underestimated. These two men were the first to go to the scaffold for political differences. They died for their party belief. That had never happened before.
So Charles was triumphant and, for the final two years of his reign, lived seemingly contented with his lot at home.
This period also saw the restoration of the gentry as the social leaders of the nation. The Commonwealth had set aside the upper-class systems of hereditary right to a position in society. When the Restoration came along, the landowners, the gentry, moved easily back into their old positions of benevolent and social power. Through this comfortable merging of gentry and parish responsibilities came the social structure of English Church life and often that of a whole community which would survive as an obvious parochial pecking order into the twentieth century.
How the rest of the people lived, we can generally guess. According to one observer at the time, 20 per cent of the nation occasionally needed parish help. At the same time, modern critics of the social welfare system may or may not take comfort from the fact that seventeenth-century spongers were just as capable of fiddling the system as their twentieth-century descendants.
At the time of the Restoration, not much short of £1 million (in seventeenth-century money) a year was needed for parish handouts – and the figure was rising. On the parish or not, the staple diet of a less-than-well-off family was meat, bread and beer and very few vegetables. Meat was eaten at least twice a week, even for the one million on poor relief. For a comfortable family the main meal was at midday and it was enormous – lots of meat and fish every day.
At the time of Charles II’s death, the population was more than five million. Part of the breakdown of the population is provided by figures produced from taxes. For example, there were probably about 7,000 lords, temporal and spiritual; 7,800 knights; 70,000 lawyers; 52,000 clergymen; and 250,000 shopkeepers. There were 750,000 farmers; two-and-a-half million labourers, outservants, cottagers and paupers. And, as the record tells us, 30,000 vagrants described variously as gypsies, thieves and beggars.
The end of the reign of the restored monarchy came in February 1685. King Charles II died from natural causes and he is said to have apologized to those at his bedside for taking such ‘so unconscionable a time in dying’. His reign had been a period in which the emergence of party politics became apparent, and a period when to be in an opposing party wasn’t necessarily revolutionary and certainly not treasonable. Charles had been an unconscionable time in dying, although perhaps not in the way he meant. Maybe the Restoration would have been better served by a shorter reign, if not by a more reforming governance. Yet he left behind a people who shared his overriding belief in the Divine Right of Kings.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
1685–6
James II came to the throne in 1685. He was the first Catholic monarch of England since Bloody Mary (Queen 1553–8), the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, more than a century earlier. James reigned for three eventful years in which Protestant fears of Catholic domination and autocratic government led to Revolution. As we have seen, James was the second son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria so he was Charles II’s brother and, by his first marriage to the Earl of Clarendon’s daughter Mary, he had two daughters, Mary and Anne. He had the uncompromising belief of the Catholic convert. There were those at court who feared his religious ambitions for the country, but that was perhaps a sophisticated view of power-brokers. The ‘people’ did not seem to fear the new King. Certainly James did not fear the power-play in his palaces. He believed that the court and politics were secondary to his judgement that he should have a standing army – that is, a permanent army – and an efficient navy that would be the equal of the awe-inspiring France. If he, James, could establish Britain’s military grandeur then the security of the islands would be guaranteed and his le
adership respected.
With this Divine Right to rule as his standard, then James could see it possible to restore to Britain the true faith of Catholicism. Would that not inevitably lead to his throne being the icon of Catholic Europe? In his own house of England, theory was with him. The Whigs, for example, were a bowed and even a spent force. During Charles II’s closing years he had ruled without Parliament, therefore there was no challenge in the House from the Whigs and so the Crown had the power to clean out the places where the Whigs could build powerful committees and alliances. And this wasn’t confined to Parliament: the local corporations were cleared, so were the powerful livery companies in the City and the bench of judges. Also many of the Whigs capable of mustering support were now gone. Algernon Sidney and William Lord Russell had been executed. The Earl of Essex had committed suicide in the Tower (or was he pushed?) and Shaftesbury had died in exile. So, when Parliament did come together, in May 1685, it was not a balanced political group. It was dominated by the Tories (although James hardly cared for them either).
There were 513 MPs of whom only fifty-seven were Whigs. There was a genuine celebration at the arrival of James on the throne in spite of fears of some at Westminster. Bonfires were lit, church bells rung and parties were held everywhere when James was crowned on, of course, St George’s Day. And when, six months later, James celebrated his fifty-second birthday on 14 October (the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings), the bells rang out once more, fresh bonfires were lit and parties started all over again. James had put down the great Monmouth Rebellion that summer, so there was little doubting his strength, if not his popularity, for the time being anyway; it was clear that James, believing in his own authority and caring less than a fig for the constitutional view, would rule without consent for his opinions and style. For example, he ordered the release of imprisoned Catholics and had their fines repaid. And when more than 300 MPs asked him to enforce the laws against dissenters from the Church of England, he refused because dissenters included Catholics.
The first real challenge to James II came with the Monmouth Rebellion. It was named after James, Duke of Monmouth, whose mother was Lucy Walter, one of Charles II’s mistresses, and whom Charles had always believed was his son. He certainly treated him as one. There was even a claim that Charles II and Lucy Walter had married in secret. Monmouth was thirty-six and married to Anne, the rich Countess of Buccleuch. He was handsome and dashing, had fought in the third of the wars with the Dutch and in 1679 had overcome Scottish Presbyterian rebellion on the Clyde. Most important of all, Monmouth was a Protestant and during the protest against the succession of James II (while Charles II was still alive) Monmouth had been an alternative choice as King. But for the moment he was in exile in Protestant Holland.
In the summer of 1685, Monmouth was persuaded that the time was right for him to mount a rebellion. He was encouraged by, among others, a fellow exile, Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll, who promised to invade Scotland in support of him. So, hardly had James been crowned than Monmouth decided the time for rebellion was right. But the young Duke wasn’t very bright. In June he landed at Lyme Regis, with a motley crew of eighty or so followers and picked up an army of 7,000 poorly led, untrained peasants and yeomen. He had a cavalry of sorts mounted not on chargers, but carthorses. He headed towards Taunton, not east towards the capital, where he denounced James as a usurper and accused him of having murdered Charles II. It is now that we hear of the first of the famous Churchills.
James ordered his relatively small forces, including cavalry and dragoons under the command of Louis de Duras, the Earl of Feversham, to deal with the uprising. John Churchill had command of the dragoons and, leaving the other commanders way behind, force-marched his men to track and harry Monmouth’s squadrons and regiments until the main body of the King’s men caught up. When Monmouth, who probably knew his game was up anyway, surprised Feversham’s headquarters at Sedgemoor, it was Churchill who attacked, slaughtered and scattered Monmouth’s ill-disciplined yet nonetheless brave troops. Churchill’s action did not reflect the poor standard of the majority of the King’s army, or more correctly, his militia, which did not press advantage and had on occasions run before the Monmouth rabble. Churchill’s forces, more fierce and less compromising than the others, once more set about Monmouth’s forces, who knew the horrible consequences of defeat and were literally fighting for their lives. Monmouth abandoned his men to the uncompromising butchery.
Monmouth’s stupidity was his timing. James was enjoying what today would be called his political honeymoon. If Monmouth had waited, even a year, he might have had more support. One person in particular watched the goings-on in England with more than passing interest. And he watched from the Netherlands. William of Orange knew well the imperfections of Monmouth’s plan. He knew also that, with the Protestant Monmouth executed, he was, through his wife Mary, now closer to the throne.
It is said that Monmouth proclaimed himself King so that, by a statute of Henry VII, his followers might be protected because they had obeyed a King de facto. This did not much impress the King’s Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, Baron of Wem, better known simply as Judge Jeffreys (1645–89). Monmouth was captured and executed; and so were more than 200 of his followers. Another 800 were sent off to Barbados as slaves. It is said that the ladies (the royal mistresses and those in-waiting) of James’s court made a handsome profit out of it: white slaves commanded good prices in the seventeenth century.
One of the most vivid records of the period, A History of His Own Time, was written by Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), sometime Bishop of Salisbury. He’d been educated in Scotland, appointed chaplain to King Charles II and then dismissed when he criticized Charles for his social behaviour. Burnet understood well the stupidity of Monmouth for attempting a rebellion while James was at the height of his popularity, in the first months of his reign. But Burnet also believed that had James shown mercy, then his popularity might have lasted:
But his own temper, and the fury of his ministers, and the maxims of the priests, who fancied that nothing could now stand before him: all these concurred to make him lose advantages that were never to be recovered. The army was kept for some time in the western counties, which both officers and soldiers lived in as in an enemy’s country, and treated all that were believed to be ill-affected to the king with great rudeness and violence. Kirke [Colonel Kirke who, with Churchill and Feversham, had defeated Monmouth] ordered several of the prisoners to be hanged up at Taunton, without so much as the form of law, he and his company looking on from an entertainment they were at. At every new health [spa] another prisoner was hanged up. And they were so brutal that observing the shaking of the legs of those whom they hanged, it was said among them that they were dancing: and upon that, music was called for.
These were brutal times and James was shifting his political chessmen. He told his council of advisers that he wanted an immediate repeal of the Test Act and the Act of Habeas Corpus. Both Lord Halifax, the Lord President of the Council, and Lord North counselled caution, especially in the confirmation of Catholic military appointments. Halifax was sacked. North died. James was in confident mood after the crushing of Monmouth, even though the King’s militia had nearly failed him. Moreover, he was content with the Church of England’s policy of non-resistance. Now he sought to gather about him like-minded souls, and then to make his move against the one institution on which he could not rely upon: Parliament. The year was 1685, the month, November. When Parliament met he declared that he wanted military superiority over any potential enemy. He said, remembering their dubious performance against Monmouth’s untrained army, that his militia was unreliable and therefore unacceptable. James demanded a fully trained standing army. Did he mean an army to impress European enemies or an army to keep him in power? Furthermore, he made it plain that his appointments of Catholic officers in the army had strengthened the formations. These men would stay. Imagine Parliament’s reaction. These Catholic appointments threat
ened the authority of the Church of England. The thought of a standing army reinvigorated the fear of absolute control and, for some, Cromwellian nightmares. Parliament felt its very position challenged and the King’s authority to take such steps legally questionable. This mattered not. When James heard that his authority was being challenged, he did what none could stop him doing: he went to Parliament and shut it down. Parliament was prorogued and stayed so for the rest of James’s albeit short reign.
It was now the Church, the Anglican Church, which led the opposition. The Church opposed the King’s policies, but did not make a downright attempt to dethrone him. But this was the beginning of the end. Sermons and pamphlets and slim books started to appear – all opposing Roman Catholicism. The centre for the opposition was London, led by its Bishop, Henry Compton. He was a thoughtful, powerful man, much respected by the clergy. He had voted for James when the Lords had debated the Bill of Exclusion, but now he and his clergy preached against popery. James issued his famous ‘Directions to Preachers’ which told the clergy to stick to less contentious matters. They refused. He then set up his Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes, which immediately suspended Bishop Compton. Two years later, Compton’s signature appeared on a secret letter sent to Prince William of Orange, inviting him to bring his army to England. Little wonder that any friends James imagined he might have kept melted into the shadow he had cast over his court. James disregarded the signs. When Clarendon fell he was replaced by a Catholic. The eighteen-year-old Duke of Berwick, the son of James II and his mistress, Anne Hyde, found himself Governor of Portsmouth. Equally, the King still had a few supporters who were not Catholics. Some of them such unlikely characters – Whigs even – that they were seen as collaborators. There was no saving the throne. Only a few years before, the first political parties in British history had been formed and the Tories had supported James’s right of succession. Now they were against him.
This Sceptred Isle Page 34