by Simon Schama
It was an inspired circumnavigation of the conflict. The Church had surely been saved, without compromising the authority of the Crown in matters regarding succession. And Charles’s ‘expedient’ seemed reasonable enough to begin turning public opinion back towards the king. But when a second Whig-dominated House of Commons was elected (after Charles had dissolved the first), Shaftesbury was too confident in his apparent triumph to notice the slight tremor in the ground under him until it became the gaping fault that swallowed him up. The Commons passed an Exclusion Bill by a two-to-one majority, while the Lords defeated it by the same majority. The deadlock meant that Charles was in a position to call Shaftesbury’s bluff, and he coolly proceeded to do so (after having taken the precautionary measure of pocketing another massive hand-out from Louis XIV). In 1681 a third parliament was summoned to Oxford, where the Crown and its enemies had tested their wills in 1258. All sweet reason, Charles tabled his ‘expedient’ once more, only to have it brushed aside, as he had calculated, by Shaftesbury’s insistence on Exclusion. The only way forward now was a resolution by force. Indeed, some of the Whigs showed up at Oxford in arms, while others talked openly of a return to the Commonwealth – exactly the ammunition Charles needed to make his case that it was the Exclusionists, not the loyalists, who were pushing the country towards civil war. In the end, he knew that Shaftesbury just did not have the stomach for a true battle; and just in case he did, with Louis XIV’s gold jingling in the royal treasure chest, Charles knew that this time, unlike in 1642, the Crown had the funds to mobilize in a hurry.
So what followed Oxford, as far as the Exclusionists were concerned, was – nothing. With nowhere to go, they divided into those who sharpened their sabres and those who shuffled back in anticlimactic gloom to their horses and houses. With the wind shifting smartly, the villains of the piece – the fantastic cast of con-men, cut-throats and repeat-perjurors who comprised the case for the Popish Plot – were the first to smell trouble and promptly turned king’s evidence, confessing one by one to the pack of lies. During the trial of George Wakeman, the queen’s doctor, Chief Justice Scroggs launched the first attack on Titus Oates’s veracity. What might have been a revolution now collapsed. Acquitted of high treason, Shaftesbury fled to Holland where he died in 1683. Oates was arrested in 1684 – for cruising, of course – but the next year was tried for and convicted of perjury, for which he was savagely flogged, set in the pillory and then sent to prison. Never pinned down for long, though, he re-emerged in 1688 and died (what else?) a Baptist preacher.
Buried beneath the débâcle, Shaftesbury left something behind other than a reputation for breathtaking political cynicism, and characteristically the pieces of his legacy were at complete odds with each other. On the one hand, his willingness to patronize and make credible the political theory of John Locke and other exponents of a contract theory of government had given a new lease of life to genuinely radical ideas, which, it had been assumed, had perished for good in 1659. The notion that the government derived its legitimacy not just from its capacity to protect (as Hobbes had argued), nor simply from scriptural authority (as Filmer had insisted) but from the consent of the governed as well, who, when they entrusted it with power, had not thereby surrendered their natural rights of liberty and property, would have an extraordinary future ahead of it. The proposition that ‘Every form of Government is of our Creation,’ wrote Locke, ‘and not God’s and must comply with the safety of the people in all that it can’ was still radical and even shocking. But it was no longer unusual or outlandish to read or hear it uttered. Nor was the allied axiom that in entrusting a government (or a monarch) with authority, those from whom it ultimately derived ought not to be assumed to be alienating their rights to call it to account, should it grossly exceed its lawful authority; should it, in fact, pass from authority to tyranny, or even flout the liberties it was appointed to protect. Perhaps these arguments may have stayed marginal to English politics for the best part of another century. But across the Atlantic, the refusal of southern New Englanders to truckle to what they saw as the ‘arbitrary’ power of the royal governor of all New England, Sir Edmund Andros, and instead to set out on a self-authorized exodus to Connecticut, already showed that the seeds sown in the rich but unsavoury soil of the Exclusion crisis could bear fruit.
Ironically, though, what the founding fathers of Connecticut were objecting to was precisely the aggressive manipulation of official authority that was also Shaftesbury’s legacy. For during his brief period in power, he had out-Danbyed Danby by using every conceivable political lever – patronage, bribery, judicial intimidation and a massive print propaganda campaign in the now uncensored press – to build what he and the Whigs hoped would be an invincible political machine. And this was the machine that was conveniently handed over to Charles II and his new ministers – in particular Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester (Clarendon’s son), and Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland – who used it to build massive ramparts around the restored authority of the monarchy. The years from 1683 to 1688 were years of packings and purges. Town corporations suspected of being unfriendly to the succession were required to turn over their charters, which were duly amended to produce more obliging local governments. Unhelpful judges were weeded out, zealous Tories rewarded with place and favour. It was all very carefully engineered, and with a veneer of legality; but between them Charles II and his last government managed to build a machine of state power the likes of which his father and grandfather (or for that matter Protector Cromwell) could scarcely have dreamed. But then they had lived in what now seemed an incomprehensibly remote age, driven by passions and clouded by pious prejudices. Men like Sunderland, though, were modern political animals, whose understanding of humanity presupposed the usefulness of the baser, regrettably universal instincts of greed, ambition and egotism. Shaftesbury, when all was said and done, had come from a generation of men who fancied themselves technicians of administration. Sunderland and his kind, on the other hand, were the first modern political managers for whom money was the lubricant of power.
They knew, moreover, all about the tactical deployment of half-truths and bogeymen. If there were any murmuring of protest from the shires about the high-handed and arbitrary interference in local affairs, all they had to do was to invoke the dreadful spectre of Cromwellian revolution and they could expect the gentry to shut up and pass the port. In 1683 a group of republicans – among them two aristocrats, Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, as well as the ex-Leveller John Wildman – frustrated and embittered by Shaftesbury’s betrayal, turned to conspiracy instead in an attempt to put Monmouth on the throne. As soon as this Rye House Plot was discovered, the government realized that it was a gift, not a threat. The principals were beheaded for treason, Sidney heroically insisting, in a letter to the Sheriff of London written on the eve of his execution, that ‘God had left Nations to the Liberty of setting up such Governments as best pleas’d themselves’ and that ‘Magistrates were set up for the good of Nations, not Nations for the honour of Magistrates’. Armed with such incendiary confessions, the government could defend its aggressive policy of interference in town charters, its packings and purgings, as a matter of state security.
But for the misfortune of having to leave the earthly world he had enjoyed only too visibly and too much, Charles II could die in February 1685 in the satisfying knowledge that he had made the realm safe for the monarchy. Evelyn’s last sight of the king was, for him, a depressing spectacle, ‘unexpressable luxury, & prophaneners gaming & all dissolution, and as it were total forgetfullnesse of God (it being Sunday Evening) . . . the King, sitting & toying with his Concubines Portsmouth [and] Cleveland . . . A French boy singing love songs, in that glorious Gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate Courtiers & other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in Gold before them . . . a sense of utmost vanity.’ There was always time, though, Charles must have reckoned, for repentance. At the last he accepted his bro
ther’s offer to be received back into the arms of the Mother Church, confessed his sins (or a necessarily abbreviated digest of them) and was duly granted the Catholic rite of absolution. And Charles might have taken even the privacy of this last little ceremony as a happy instance of how the Stuart monarchy might survive within an Anglican kingdom. How wrong his mother had been and how well this boded for the prospects of his brother! All James had to do was to abide by the intelligently laid-out limits within which he was free to practise his confession; accept the fact of parliamentary elections without having to surrender his prerogative (in, for example, a choice of ministers) to them; defer to parliament in military and ecclesiastical appointments; and then sit back on a throne cushioned by common sense.
At first, it seemed that this was precisely what would happen. Although it suited later Whig history to argue that, from the very beginning, James II was an alien, un-English presence in the body politic, bound to end in expulsion, there was, in fact, nothing inevitable at all about what finally unfolded. (Indeed, even after William of Orange’s landing at Torbay on 5 November 1688, James, had he behaved intelligently, might easily have kept his throne.) One of the new king’s first acts was to promise to William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, that he would ‘undertake nothing against the religion which is established by law’, but adding, rather ominously ‘unless you first break your word to me’. And it was evident, moreover, from the largely uncontested elections of 1685 and the favourable Tory-monarchist majority returned that James had inherited the continuing groundswell of public loyalty left by his brother. When the Duke of Monmouth attempted an insurrection in the West Country (at the same time as a rising led by the Duke of Argyll in Scotland) to make Exclusion a fact by force of arms, he was defeated as much by the massive indifference of the vast majority of the population as by his own military and political ineptness. Even the brutal ‘Bloody Assizes’, presided over by the enthusiastic hanging Judge George Jeffreys, remains more notorious in subsequent Whig history than at the time, when rows of gibbets were nothing special in the political culture.
Unreconciled Whigs could reassure themselves that in the end, Death, the Great Excluder, would win the battle for them. For James was fifty-two when he became king, middle-aged, if not actually rather elderly by the standards of the seventeenth century, and still without a son. His heirs were his two daughters by Anne Hyde, Mary and Anne, both of whom had ignored their father and remained Protestant. In 1677, Mary had been married off by Danby to none other than the Prince of Orange, soon to be William III, now cast (and for good reason) as the international hero of Protestant resistance to the aggressive Catholic expansionism of Louis XIV. William’s story, moreover, was known in England through the brilliantly produced propaganda histories of the war of 1672, complete with graphic illustrations by the geniuses of Dutch history prints, Romeyn de Hooghe and Abraham de Wicquevoort. In these unforget-table images the French-Catholic troops of Louis XIV are depicted, much like the Spanish a century before, as subhuman marauders, revelling in rape and mutilation (impaled babies, eviscerated pregnant mothers, roughed-up grandpas – the usual thing), while the invariably fat, gloating friars sing masses in Protestant churches reconsecrated to Rome.
It was exactly this ominous sense of the resurrection of an international war of religion, and the unsettling sense that he had got himself marooned on the wrong side that were to be James’s undoing. His brother had bequeathed him a state constructed from pragmatic ingenuity. But surely God had anointed him with the holy oil for purposes other than just lubricating the wheels and cogs of power? If, after all his family’s troubles and travels, the Almighty had seen fit to set him on the throne, how could he turn aside from doing His will? And doing it urgently.
It was hard, at first, to take this intensity of mission seriously. For all his dark solemnity James seemed to behave, in crucially telling respects, precisely like his brother, sleeping with his mistress Catherine Sedley even while making a parade of openly going to Mass. Surely, then, this was a man, whatever his coarse humourlessness, who understood the arts of convenience, political as well as sexual. Why ruin a good thing? What was wrong with the ‘arrangement’ made by Charles II – that James would not be expected to enforce the penalties against Catholics so long as he made no attempt to repeal them?
But the temperamental difference between the two sons of Charles I was genuine and did have serious implications for the political fate of Britain. Hard-boiled though he could be, Charles II was by nature a pluralist, someone who was quite prepared to listen to people with whom he did not necessarily agree (other than Shaftesbury, that is). But if Charles accepted, to some extent, variety, James was relentlessly single-minded. Not surprisingly, he was proud of inventing a ‘Universal Sauce’ made from parsley, dry toast and vinegar, and beaten in a mortar, which he thought equally suitable for dishes of fish, flesh and fowl. If they were ground fine enough, and with enough perseverance, he may have supposed he could make his own views of Church and state palatable to his people. He could not, in all conscience, remain content with the bounds set by his brother. From the beginning of his reign he chafed at them. James’s goal was not, of course, to force England back to Rome overnight. The slightest historical acquaintance with the ill-starred reign of Mary Tudor made that course of action obviously undesirable. But he certainly meant to go beyond the timid attempt of his brother in 1672 to allow Catholics some relief from the penal laws and the practice of their religion within their own four walls. He made it clear to Sancroft and the bishops, as well as to his Tory ministers, that he would be satisfied with nothing less than free and open public worship. And he was not going to forget the humiliation of his own ejection from office as a result of the Test Act. It should either be repealed, or what he claimed to be the ‘dispensing power’ of his royal prerogative could be used to publish a Declaration in effect suspending it, along with the other penalties for Catholic and Nonconformist practice.
But that ‘dispensing’ power had already been judged illegal in both 1662 and 1672 when Charles II had advanced his much more cautious measures. So why James should have imagined that the High Church and Tory country gentlemen who had flocked to the Stuart cause against Shaftesbury and Monmouth should now change their minds was a mystery. Equally, James overrated the ease with which he could persuade his natural constituency that there was nothing untoward in reopening the formal relations with Rome, sundered since the 1530s, nor in re-establishing four Apostolic vicars-general for England, nor in appointing Catholic officers in the army and navy. And why did he imagine that he could make the English people, whose anti-Catholic prejudices had certainly not been leavened by the exposure of Oates’s fraud, accept the overnight visibility of Catholic practice – monks and nuns in their habits, public processions on feast days, churches echoing again with the sounds of the Mass? But by 1687 James was no longer listening – at least with any degree of attentiveness – to the voices of reason. He was issuing warnings and veiled threats to the bishops that they had better not think about opposing his will, or ‘I shall find a way to do my business without you.’ James was listening to the voices in his head. And they were singing hosannas.
At which point a word of warning is in order. What then unfolded was not a simple struggle between the forces of reaction and progress, between benighted absolutism and constitutional liberalism. That was certainly the history of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that the Whigs liked to tell. But the Whigs were only the principal and not the exclusive beneficiaries of that revolution (there was a large bloc of Tories in the post-revolution parliament), and they certainly did not bring it about. What made the difference between the fiasco of the Exclusion crisis and the victory of 1688 was the fact that Tory England – the bishops, the peers and the country gentry – was driven, despite its adherence to the doctrines of non-resistance, to resist. Among the famous ‘Seven’ who issued an invitation to William to come to England to secure a ‘free parliament’ and the Church
of England was none other than that ultimate anti-Whig, Danby. For the Tory commitment to obey had never been unconditional. Obedience to lawful commands was their watchword. And by January 1688 they had become convinced that it was James who was the real revolutionary, who sought to overturn everything the Restoration had stood for, and who now had at all costs to be stopped. Even the staunchest Tory allowed that it might be possible for a king to unking himself (as Edward II had done), so sundering the bonds of loyalty tying subject to monarch.
Well, was James a revolutionary? To consider calmly and dispassionately what the two sides in the confrontation of 1687–8 actually stood for is to scramble all our conventional clichés about the good, the bad and the constitutional. Whatever else 1688–90 may have been it was certainly not, as Macaulay thought, a Manichaean struggle between the forces of light and darkness. Many of the things that are said about James are extrapolations from the received wisdom that he got what he deserved; that the long-nosed face (which actually was no more or less ‘haughty’ than any other portrait type of that period) betrays a man of incurably despotic temper. Not all of this image is wrong. James had obviously not graduated from the same charm school as his brother. But he was at least as intelligent as Charles, had shown himself more competent in naval battle and was, without question, a lot more conscientious in his attention to government. Much of the stereotype of the brutal autocrat is a projection backwards from the story written by the winners. There is no question whatsoever, of course, that James was indeed a divine-right absolutist who believed that parliament had the right to offer advice and criticism and even propose legislation, but that he had the right if he so chose to reject all of it and to have that be the end of the matter. But the cause for which James was apt to get stirred up was, after all, toleration, that ‘liberty of conscience’ that Cromwell had so often warbled about, only extended, unlike the Cromwellian state, to Catholics. No wonder, then, that some of James’s warmest allies were not just Catholics, but dissenters like the Quaker William Penn the younger. And by no means all the men of science and reason were to be found in the camp of his enemies. Pepys, for one, James’s Secretary of the Navy and the epitome of humane reasonableness, remained loyal to the bitter end. It is odd, in fact, that while in conventional histories the European ‘enlightened despots’ of the eighteenth century, like Frederick the Great and the Emperor Joseph II, get credit for imposing toleration on their subjects, the same benefit is not extended to James II. In Ireland, James was the first English king who actually made a strenuous and politically dangerous effort to reverse the brutal wars of colonization that had disfigured the country and dispossessed its native landowners since at least the reign of Elizabeth I. His cardinal sin, to Macaulay, was that he unaccountably appeared to favour the people whom the Victorian historian called the ‘aboriginals’. Conversely, those who opposed James were essentially held together in a classically Cromwellian alliance of bigotry, as the war of 1689–90 would make unequivocally clear.