A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  Crestfallen at the reception of the Great Model, Wren mounted a campaign to try to have the king overrule the objections of the Cathedral Chapter. But persuade, argue, even implore as Wren tried, Charles had made up his mind. While no objection was raised to some sort of domed crossing, Wren was ordered to meet the Chapter’s complaints by reverting to a traditional Latin cross. Almost as if in a sulky demonstration of the impossibility of squaring (or rectangularizing) the circle, that first ‘Warrant’ design was the most absurdly incongruous of all Wren’s plans, obediently attaching a long nave to a bizarre double-tiered dome consisting of a Bramante-like squat circular base with a peculiar Michelangelesque onion dome on top: an Anglican pagoda. After the inevitable failure of this monstrosity, it would take Wren years to come up with a more acceptable compromise, largely by surreptitiously ignoring some of the restraints and reverting to his original vision of 1663, in which there would be two grandiose statements on the cathedral – the mighty dome at the east end and a great portico at the west, the two connected by a spacious nave.

  That is the cathedral as it stands today, more or less. But it’s impossible to sit in the nave, with its echoes bouncing off the columns, and not dream of Wren’s banished basilica, where perfect sound would have been bathed in limpid pools of light. Although he carried on with his work at St Paul’s, Wren was devastated by the rejection. It was said that, as he heard the king’s final decision, tears stood in his eyes. And although he was supposed to have been consoled by the grant of his knighthood, Wren’s cup of sorrow overflowed during 1674. He was defeated in an attempt to win election to the House of Commons for Oxford and endured the death of first a child, and then of his wife, in 1675. His ambition to convert London into a new Rome had been a victim of terrible timing. For between the inception of the idea and Wren’s attempt to persuade the earthly powers of its ‘beauty and convenience’, something ugly had happened to English politics. That something was the return of the prime patriotic neurosis: anti-Catholicism.

  It had never really gone away, of course. Between the Gunpowder and the Popish plots the equation of Catholicism with ‘enslavement’ to the demonic power of tyrannical, Jesuitical Rome shrank to the margins of the great events of the mid-century wars and revolution. And understandably so, since by the Restoration probably not much more than 1 per cent of the population of England (probably rather more in Scotland) remained actively practising Catholics. But the power of anti-Catholicism as a polarizing force in politics, and the ease by which it could be exploited to unleash uncontainable forces of hysteria, fury and panic, were out of all proportion to the reality of the threat. In 1641 it had been the perception that Charles I was secretly behind the Irish insurrection and that he would use Catholic soldiers against both the Scots and English that had convinced men like Pym and Cromwell that the king could no longer be safely entrusted with control of the militia. In that sense at least, anti-Catholicism had been the proximate cause of the civil war. In 1649 Cromwell’s conviction that a royalist army in Ireland might still be used to reverse the victory of parliament made him determined to annihilate resistance in that country and created in the wake of his conquests the first kingless Britain. Running through two centuries of British history like a scarlet thread – from Walsingham’s security state in the 1570s to the Gordon Riots in the 1780s – was the adamant conviction that Rome’s war on heresy had ruled out the possibility of being loyal to both Church and king (or Commonwealth). Even those, like Cromwell, who had passionately believed in religious liberty, axiomatically denied that liberty to Catholics. Milton, the great guardian of the free conscience, refused to allow that Catholics were, in fact, Christians at all. For at least a century – ever since the publication of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (the ‘Book of Martyrs’) – national identity had been hammered out against the anvil of a perennially threatening, fiendishly devious, politically tyrannical and spiritually demonic Rome. The only question had been which power had been better able to protect the heart of the nation from the dagger of the Antichrist pointed at it – king or Commonwealth, parliament or Protector?

  The credentials of the Protectorate as an Anglo-Protestant warrior-state, much vaunted by Cromwell in a rabidly anti-Spanish oration to parliament, had taken a fatal blow when the ‘Western Enterprise’ in the Caribbean came to ignominious grief on Hispaniola. And the religious and political anarchy of 1659 had provided a perfect opening for the Restoration monarchy to advertise itself as ensuring strength through a return to order and conformity. This is, indeed, what Clarendon and Archbishop Sheldon genuinely believed: that a return to the unquestioned authority of the Church of England, not some deluded and divisive liberty of conscience, was the best bulwark against the subversion of ‘fanatics’ – whether Calvinist, Quaker or Catholic. And through the honeymoon years of Charles II’s reign, notwithstanding his attempt to pass a Declaration of Indulgence in 1662, the assumption among the vast majority of the county gentry was that this was the staunch opinion of the king as well. Whatever his shortcomings as a model of upstanding Christian propriety, Charles at least went through the motions of Anglican observance, and when taxed with the consequences of his relentless lechery responded disarmingly that he did not believe ‘God would damn a man for a little irregular pleasure’.

  But elegant flippancy only took you so far. In good times it advanced general merriment, a quality the Restoration consciously promoted against the public grimness of the Protectorate. In bad times, though, the banter could suddenly seem wan and facetious. (Evelyn, the devoted monarchist, quickly sickened of it as so much political confectionery.) The avalanche of misfortune that crashed down on England after 1665 raised questions among the more pious gentry in the shires, who were by no means all unreconstructed Presbyterians, about the seriousness with which Charles took his coronation vow to be the Defender of the Faith. The shamelessness of his debauchery, the squalid promiscuousness with which he took both mistresses and spaniels into his bed (sometimes, it was said not inaccurately, at the same time), undoubtedly had a cumulative effect on men who identified with the supposedly independent, old-fashioned virtues of ‘country’ as against the licentious sink and rapacious self-promotion of the ‘court’. It was an article of country-Cavalier faith that their displeasure with court and courtiers would never affect their allegiance to the king himself. But over the long stretch of bad years, country suspicion and hostility towards those around the king deepened, and with it came anxiety that the king’s proverbial laziness, self-indulgence and irresolution (so unlike his sainted father) might yet lead the country into crisis, even before Charles had deigned to notice it. John Evelyn, who always had his ear to the ground when it came to the prejudices of the gentry, echoed them by judging that Charles, who ‘would doubtless have been an excellent prince, had he been less addicted to women, who made him uneasy and always in want to supply their unmeasurable profusion’, was sovereign of everything except himself.

  Towards the end of the decade, these fears, for a while amorphous and unarticulated, began to take on much crisper definition. There was, to begin with, the disturbing fact of royal childlessness. The barrenness of the Portuguese Catholic queen, Catherine of Braganza – in unhappy contrast to the fecundity of Charles’s many mistresses – was surely some sort of punishment laid on the kingdom. If you looked at the world through the correct – which was to say the most conspiratorially acute – lenses, you saw right away something so rotten that it could only have originated in the filthy stews of the Whore of Babylon (aka the Jesuit-ridden Papacy). Fatal sterility and spendthrift concupiscence were part of the same plan – to sap the vitals of sturdy Protestant England.

  Fruitlessness led to fretfulness. Without a direct heir, the next in line to the throne was the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, whose own confessional allegiances seemed much closer to those of the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, still very much alive and very much the unrepentant Catholic, utterly convinced that the downfall of her husband had b
een his wishful thinking that a strong monarchy could be created in an Anglican, parliamentary country. James, described as ‘the most unguarded ogler in England’, was every bit as much of an unappetizing lecher as his older brother, but, unlike Charles, managed to alternate hearty bouts of lust with equally fierce orgies of sanctimoniousness. James’s first marriage, to Clarendon’s daughter Anne Hyde, had shown that he could indeed produce children, at least daughters. Demoted by James’s mistresses to an object of ridicule, Anne sought consolation in the Hyde family weakness, the table, and like her father expanded in girth as she declined in dignity. When she died in 1671, leaving the two girls, Mary and Anne, who would both become queen and who resisted their father’s efforts to make them follow him back into the arms of the Roman Church, James lost no time in taking a second wife in 1673: the unquestionably Catholic (and strikingly beautiful) Mary of Modena.

  With that marriage, and the prospect of a Catholic heir, the threshold of anti-Catholic hysteria dramatically lowered. A year or so earlier, James had gone public for the first time, declaring his return to the Roman Church by conspicuously failing to attend Anglican communion at Easter. This calculated advertisement of his confessional allegiance put the Anglican hierarchy and the gentry in the shires on notice that, unless something changed, they could expect a Papist king and perhaps a Papist dynasty to follow. Hackles rose in Hampshire. Paranoid though the reaction was, had the guardians of the Anglican settlement known the whole truth their suspicions would have turned to apoplexy. For on 25 January 1669 (significantly, the feast of the conversion of St Paul) Charles II had expressed his regrets to his brother that he was not able to profess openly the faith to which he too was genuinely drawn. No one (other than the Pope himself) could have been gladder to hear of this than Louis XIV, who had been targeting his own secret weapon – the glamorous Louise de Kéroualle – directly at the place he knew it was bound to score a direct hit: Charles II’s bed. It certainly did no harm to the French king’s strategy. For Louise cantered between the royal sheets, routing her rivals, as brilliantly as Louis triumphed on the battlefield, and Charles was helplessly seduced by both of them. Louise bore Charles a son in 1672 and in 1673 was made Duchess of Portsmouth. And in 1670, Charles was grateful enough to sign a clandestine treaty with Louis. Although he was encouraged in this direction by some of his inner circle of ministers – particularly Lord Ashley, Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, and Thomas Clifford – the terms of the treaty were shocking enough to be kept from the majority of the Privy Council and especially the dourly suspicious Scot, John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale. This was just as well, since any objective observer would have to conclude that what Charles had done, in his obtuse recklessness, was to mortgage his sovereignty to the king of France, or rather replace dependence on an English parliament by dependence on the bounty of the French purse. In return for a Versailles hand-out, handsome enough to free Charles from the inconvenience of having to go cap in hand every few years to parliament, the English king had committed himself to easing the conditions of English Catholics and perhaps, when a suitable occasion arose, even declaring his own true confessional allegiance. And there was more. Charles had committed himself to joining Louis’s surprise attack on the Protestant Dutch Republic, a policy much easier to justify in England as payback for the humiliation of 1667.

  To suggestions that some sort of deal had been made with France, Charles II simply lied, flatly denying there had been any under-the-table treaty. In fact, the provisions of the secret Treaty of Dover exceeded the most feverish nightmares of anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists. The birthright that Charles had casually bartered away was, after all, not his to give away but parliament’s. And there was still worse. Had the king bothered to reflect in any detail on the issues that had caused so much grief for his father in 1641, he might have recalled that the suspicion that Charles I was about to call in a foreign, Catholic (Irish) army had been top of the list. That had been the red rag waved at the parliamentary bull, which more than anything else had provoked them to strip the king of his control of the militia. It had, in fact, triggered the civil war. So what did his son do in 1670 but agree to the importation of French troops in the event of facing his own domestic rebellion?

  Some of Charles’s ministers who led him into this suicidally reckless stratagem had their own reasons. Clifford, as it would be discovered before he committed suicide, was a secret Catholic. Lord Arlington probably was, too, although he justified the Declaration of Indulgence of March 1672 essentially as a measure designed to strengthen, not weaken, the security of the state, especially against Nonconformists notorious for their unreconciled republicanism. For while the Declaration meant that Catholics were now allowed to worship in private houses (a detail that did nothing to allay suspicions), Dissenters, ostensibly receiving even-handed treatment, were required to apply for the official licensing of their places of gathering and worship.

  The dramatic, undeclared opening of Charles’s second war against the Dutch in May 1672 and the success of both English warships and Louis XIV’s armies, who occupied two-thirds of the country, reducing the most powerful state in the world to chaos, was such an unalloyed source of gloating to patriotic opinion, still smarting from the débâcle of 1667, that for a while it silenced questions about the king’s motives for issuing the Declaration of Indulgence. But quite quickly the war deteriorated and with it any kind of consensus. The young Prince of Orange, William III, took over as the Captain and Admiral-General of the panic-stricken Dutch Republic, on the brink, so it seemed, of annihilation. The scapegoats of the nightmare, the brothers De Witt, who had led the Republic to the great victory of 1667 and then into this catastrophe, were physically torn to pieces on the streets of The Hague. William, who had been kept powerless by Jan De Witt, shed no tears. But nor did he capitulate to the aggression. Instead of coming to terms, as expected, with the kings of France and England (both of whom were his relatives), William became an overnight Protestant hero by rallying his Fatherland to all-out defiant resistance. Flattering comparisons were made with his great-grandfather, William the Silent. The dykes were once again cut, as they had been almost exactly a century before, and Louis XIV’s army, like Philip II’s, became literally bogged down. Instead of mopping up resistance, it sank into the peaty mire. Dutch fleets began to inflict brutal attacks on English and French ships, and very quickly the war consensus inside the English government unravelled as defeats presented irresistible opportunities for critics among the country party to present the botched war and the Declaration of Indulgence as a sell-out to the Gallo-Catholic menace.

  The incoming administration, committed to making a separate peace with the Dutch and reversing the Declaration of Indulgence, was led by Thomas Osborne, shortly to be Lord Danby. Although every bit as ambitious and self-seeking as the men he replaced, Danby was the very first English politician to present himself to the nation, quite self-consciously, as the Voice of the Shires: the country gentleman’s friend and mouthpiece, fiercely Anglican, staunchly conservative, unquestionably royalist, but in an English, not a Frenchified, way. His government set its seal on power by forcing (on pain of denying the king revenues) the rescinding of the Declaration of Indulgence. In its place was put an anti-Catholic Test Act, which required all holders of any public office – including magistrates, members of parliament and officers of state, or of the army and navy – to deny the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and to conform in every way with the Anglican settlement. Thus the two pillars of Charles’s rapprochement with Louis – toleration for Catholics and the anti-Dutch war – were simultaneously shattered. Privately, Charles let his regrets be known but complained that his hands were tied by parliament. Privately, Louis thought any king who would permit such contemptible insolence was hardly worthy of the office. Most incomprehensible of all to him was Charles’s willingness to see his own brother, the next in line to the throne, deprived of his high office as Lord High Admiral for refusing to take a ‘Test’ imposed
on royal blood by a noisy rabble of presumptuous commoners.

  After the upheaval of 1672–3, the five years of the Danby regime that followed are often presented as some sort of placid recuperation, in which the potentially explosive nature of anti-Catholicism had been neutralized by heavy doses of Anglican rectitude and all around happiness with the status quo. By this account the even more tumultuous, near-revolutionary crisis that followed the ‘revelation’ of the fake Popish Plot came out of a clear blue sky as well as out of the criminally paranoid brains of Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. But their bizarre allegations of Catholic plots to assassinate the king and replace him with the Duke of York could not possibly have sent the country into the most extreme political convulsion it had experienced since the civil war unless the ground had been very well prepared in the preceding years. For if Danby’s original claim to power had rested on his promise to purge the body politic of anything resembling pro-French Catholicism, many of his critics came to the conclusion that the remedy seemed worse than the disease. Danby’s management of members of parliament as something like a ‘Crown’ party; his manipulation of patronage conditional on political obedience; his attempt to make office-holders sign a formal renunciation of any resistance to the monarch on any grounds; and his willingness to perpetuate, indefinitely, the life of the already long-lived Cavalier Parliament of 1661, all seemed evidence that he was actually making English government over in the image of the absolutism he professed to abhor.

  These critics were not altogether wrong. Before the 1670s, opposition to governments had been moved by, and expressed in, dislike of particular men (Strafford or Clarendon) and particular measures (ship money). Not since 1640–42 had politics been articulated in such sharply ideological terms. And it was the adversaries of the power of the Crown, so apparently entrenched by Danby, who made the going. Lord Shaftesbury, who as Anthony Ashley Cooper had been successively a Barebone’s MP, a Cromwellian Councillor of State and a Restoration Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been seen as the epitome of the scoundrelly opportunist, reaching for whatever politics was most likely to propel him into power and keep him there. And Shaftesbury was certainly not free of opportunism. He had, after all, been evicted from office by Danby and was impatient for revenge. But without perverting the truth too indecently, Shaftesbury could, as he began to don the mantle of the Guardian of the Ancient Constitution, plausibly claim to be revolving back to the principles that had begun his political career: the Cromwellian polity sketched out in the Humble Petition and Advice of 1657 of a ‘government of a single person and [a bicameral] parliament’. There was, after all, a rich historical tradition to draw on, stretching back even beyond the Provisions of Oxford and Magna Carta to the purported Saxon witangemot, which insisted that royal power had always rested on conciliar consent. What made the royal polity of England English, and especially un-French, was that it had always been a contract. This is what the Stuarts, misled by councillors like Danby who hoped to swell their own fortunes on the back of an over-mighty sovereignty, failed to understand. Any subject expecting to be protected from the ever present Catholic-tyrannical menace across the Channel by Crown-engrossers such as Danby was deceived. For only under an authentically English mixed monarchy, one prepared to concede that sovereignty was shared among king, Lords and Commons, could the liberties of the people and the Protestant Church be truly safeguarded.