It was bad news for those who hoped Britain’s civil wars were over, but what followed was worse. For when Charles died, not long afterwards, it turned out he had been a secret Catholic all along. And his brother, James, who was crowned king of England, Scotland and Ireland, became the first Catholic monarch since Bloody Mary.
Huguenots
EVERYONE feared James would try to make his kingdoms Catholic again, and rule as an absolute monarch, like king Louis of France. And in the very year he became king, Louis proved how cruel absolute monarchs could be by passing a law that everyone in France had to become Catholic or leave. There were still many Protestants in France, who were called Huguenots, and Louis sent soldiers to burn their churches and drive them out of their homes.
“Is that what James wants to do to us?” people in Britain whispered to each other.
Sadly the Huguenots packed up and left France. Some went to Holland, where people of all faiths were welcome, and many came to England.
You have to be very brave to leave everything you know and go to a new country to make a new life. Huguenots arrived on ships, carrying everything they owned. Most didn’t speak English, so when they asked for directions people shrugged, or spoke so quickly they couldn’t understand. Often Huguenots stuck together so they could speak their own language, worship with their friends and eat food they were used to. Some settled in Spitalfields, in the East End of London, and others in Soho.
Many Londoners were kind, helping them find jobs and homes, but there are always people who hate anyone different, and some treated the Huguenots badly, refusing to serve them in shops, or spitting on the pavement when they heard them speaking French. For a lot of the immigrants, the first years in England were frightening and difficult.
Fortunately many of them were skilled craftsmen: silk weavers, bankers, lawyers or silversmiths. Huguenots worked hard to build a new life and give something back to the country that had taken them in. And as time went by, people in Britain realized they could learn from them. They started to enjoy French food and to buy the fashions of the Huguenot silk-weavers. For their part, Huguenots learned English so they could talk to people around them.
And so Britain learned an important lesson about immigrants. By trying to make everyone the same, Louis XIV had made France weaker. Instead, the immigrants’ energy and new ideas went to Britain, and, by welcoming them, Britain became stronger than ever.
The Glorious Revolution
TODAY, Protestants and Catholics believe much the same things, and no longer argue with each other, so it’s hard to understand how they hated each other in those days. Each thought the other evil, and persecuted them whenever they got the chance. In Britain, there were Protestants of different kinds – Puritan and Church of England, Presbyterian and Church of Scotland – who often quarrelled; but they agreed about one thing: they hated Catholics even more than they hated each other.
Everyone wished Charles II had had a Protestant son who could be king instead of his Catholic brother, James. In fact, Charles did have a son, the duke of Monmouth. He was handsome, charming and Protestant, but unfortunately his mother was one of Charles’s mistresses, so the duke of Monmouth was illegitimate and couldn’t be king. When Charles died, Monmouth, who was living in Holland, decided to try to make himself king anyway. He declared his mother had married King Charles secretly so he wasn’t illegitimate, landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset, and called all Whigs to help him.
But Monmouth’s Rebellion didn’t last long, because most people hated the idea of another civil war, and didn’t believe the story about his mother. His army was beaten at Sedgemoor, in Somerset; Monmouth was taken to the Tower of London and executed; and James II was crowned king.
“Just wait!” warned the Whigs. “He’ll put Catholics in charge, get rid of Parliament and run the country by himself!”
And that was exactly what happened. James fell out with Parliament and closed it down, while his lord chancellor declared the king had the right to change laws or ignore them just as he pleased. The lord chancellor, George Jeffreys, was hated and feared because he had judged the prisoners who were captured after Monmouth’s Rebellion, and sentenced so many to death that the trial became known as the Bloody Assizes.
Then James quarrelled with the Church of England and passed a law to say people didn’t have to belong to it, but could worship in any way they wanted.
“It sounds fair,” said the Whigs. “But actually he just wants to help Catholics!”
And it was true that all James’s closest friends and advisers were Catholics, and he kept trying to persuade courtiers to become Catholic too.
Things went from bad to worse. When Church of England bishops complained about what he was doing, James sent seven of them to the Tower of London, and riots broke out.
“Remember Bloody Mary!” people shouted. “The Catholics will take over and burn Protestants at the stake!”
At least James had no son to become king after him. His only children were two daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne, who were both Protestant. In fact, Mary, the elder daughter, was married to the most famous Protestant in Europe, the Dutch leader, Prince William of Orange, who had saved Holland when Louis XIV of France tried to attack it. But then James’s second wife, an Italian called Mary of Modena, became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy. That meant Britain’s next king would be a Catholic like James.
“Impossible!” said the leaders of both the Whigs and the Tories. And some of them wrote to William of Orange asking him to come and help.
William wasn’t sure what to do. What would everyone say if he drove his own father-in-law off the throne? But he was worried that if Britain turned Catholic, it would become an ally of France, and France would attack Holland again. William was a quiet man, small, moody and bad-tempered, but he was very determined. At last he decided to invade Britain.
When the Spanish Armada had tried to invade Britain, a hundred years before, it ended in disaster. William tried not to think of that. To make the invasion even more dangerous, it was autumn, and gales whistled across the North Sea. The first time the Dutch navy set sail it was driven back by a storm. But William didn’t give up. He set sail again, and this time an east wind blew his fleet across the North Sea and down the Channel. The same wind trapped the British navy at Harwich, unable to get to sea.
William landed at Torbay. It was the first time an army had invaded Britain since the Norman Conquest. Sailors rowed the soldiers ashore, then went back for bundles of muskets and barrels of ammunition. Horses were lowered into the sea and swam through the waves. William’s force was made up of Dutch soldiers and French Huguenots, English and Scottish exiles. Officers tried to sort everyone out, shouting orders in four different languages until the army was ready to set off towards London.
In London James had done nothing to prepare, because he didn’t believe his son-in-law would dare invade. When he heard about William’s arrival he panicked. Quickly, he tried to undo all the unpopular laws he had passed since coming to the throne, promising to change everything back to how it was before. But no one trusted James any more, and no one believed his promises. One by one, his supporters deserted him. Generals rode away from his army. Even his younger daughter, Anne, rode out of London to join William. James started to have nosebleeds and headaches. At night he lay awake imagining being executed like his father, Charles I. Eventually he decided to escape. He sent his wife and baby son to France, then disguised himself in a black wig and crept out of the palace with two friends.
When people in London realized James was gone, they rioted, smashing up Catholic chapels and houses. Then they sent letters to William, asking him to take over. William couldn’t believe his luck. James had run away of his own accord, so he didn’t have to drive him off the throne. He could win power without fighting a battle.
Unfortunately James’s escape went wrong. His friends had arranged for a boat to meet him on the north coast of Kent and take him to France. Bu
t the boat got stuck on the mud, and before it could free itself, some fishermen arrived and arrested James and his companions. The fishermen didn’t recognize the king to start with, and thought he was a Catholic priest trying to escape.
“Traitor!” shouted Harry Moon, one of the fishermen.
They made him take his trousers down to search him, then took him to a pub in Faversham as a prisoner. Only then did they realize who James was. The king begged the sailors to let him go, first threatening them then trying to bribe them, but they refused and sent him back to London.
That was the last thing William wanted. So in the middle of the night he sent two of his officers to wake James up and send him back to Kent. A few days later James escaped again and finally reached France.
Meanwhile, William and his army marched into London with crowds lining the streets. Some people waved oranges on sticks to greet the prince of Orange. “Liberators!” they shouted. “Thank you for coming to free us!”
But not everyone cheered. Others didn’t like the sight of foreign soldiers marching in front of the king’s carriage. “Invaders!” they muttered.
In fact, no one could quite decide what had happened – whether James had run away or been forced to leave, whether William was a friend or an enemy, and – most important of all – what ought to happen next.
William called a convention of politicians, who argued about it. Some Tories said James was the lawful king, and wanted to allow him back if he promised to behave better. But Whigs thought James had given up the right to be king by breaking the law, and wanted William and his wife, Mary, to take over as king and queen.
In the end even most Tories realized William was the only one strong enough to be king. But Whigs also wanted to make sure that from now on kings would obey the law, and never rule without Parliament. So they put forward a new law called the Bill of Rights.
“Suspending laws without consent of Parliament is illegal,” it said. “Elections of Members of Parliament ought to be free. Freedom of speech in Parliament ought not to be questioned.”
When everything was agreed, Mary sailed to England from her home in Holland. She went to the Banqueting House with William, where the Bill of Rights was read out and they became joint king and queen.
Of course, not everyone was happy with what had happened. The supporters of James, who’d gone to France as a guest of Louis XIV, said he was still the real king of Britain. They went on describing him as King James II, and called themselves Jacobites, from Jacobus, the Latin word for James.
James tried to win his kingdoms back. He went to Ireland, where he had a lot of supporters because most of the people there were Catholic. But the Protestants in Ulster supported William of Orange (indeed, some Ulster Protestants still call themselves Orangemen today) and fought back. William took his army to Ireland and confronted James at the river Boyne. James’s Irish supporters fought bravely, but James himself ran away. After that the Irish called James Seamus an chaca, or “James who pooed himself”. Some of the Irish kept on fighting under their leader, Patrick Sarsfield, but in the end they had to give in, and fled to France to join the French army, becoming known as the Wild Geese.
That was the end of Britain’s civil wars and its last revolution, which is often called the Glorious Revolution. Since then Parliament has met every year, and kings and queens have obeyed the law. They have gradually become less important, so that now it is Parliament which runs Britain. Since then law courts have been free. And not long after the revolution, Parliament passed an Act to let people write whatever they liked, giving them “freedom of speech”.
But there remained one important thing to settle: how to stop people quarrelling about religion.
Toleration
NONCONFORMISTS thought the Church of England, with its bishops, robes and ceremonies, was too like the Catholic Church. Scottish Presbyterians thought the Church of Scotland (which was sometimes called Episcopalian from the Latin word for bishop) was no better. They’d all been fighting for decades. How could everyone live together in peace?
Some thought people’s beliefs ought to be up to them. Governments shouldn’t interfere, they said, and people shouldn’t interfere with each other. One of them was a philosopher called John Locke. Locke was a Whig who had spent many years in exile in Holland. There, people believed whatever they wanted, and Jews, Protestants and Catholics all lived peacefully together. John Locke thought Britain should be the same, so he wrote a book called A Letter on Toleration.
Ever since the Reformation, he wrote, the people of Europe had argued about religion, and thousands had been killed in wars. It was time to do things differently. For there would always be different faiths – Christian and Jew, Muslim and Hindu – and each would be divided – into Protestant and Catholic, or Sunni and Shiite. It was obvious people would never agree about faith. So instead of fighting and arguing, Locke said, they should agree to let everyone believe what they chose. And governments should stop telling people what to think, and let them worship in freedom.
After the Glorious Revolution, many could see he was right. “We can’t go on fighting for ever,” they said.
So Parliament passed a Toleration Act to let people worship how they wanted. It wasn’t perfect, for the Church of England went on being the official religion in England (and still is today), while the Presbyterians became the official Church in Scotland. But Protestants who disagreed were allowed to worship in their own way.
After a century of fighting, the people of Britain had finally reached a conclusion: toleration is the only way everyone can live together in peace.
TIMELINE
1605 The Gunpowder Plot: some Catholics try to blow up the king and Parliament.
1616 The pope bans Galileo from carrying out experiments. Dr Harvey proves that blood circulates through the body. Four years later, Francis Bacon writes a book about the scientific method of discovering things.
1618–48 The Thirty Years War in Europe.
1620 The Mayflower sails to America to start a colony.
1625 James I and VI dies and is replaced by his son Charles I.
1628 Parliament sends Charles its Petition of Right.
1629–40 Charles rules without Parliament. William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, changes the Church of England, and Puritans think he’s making it too Catholic.
1638 Scots sign the Covenant, demanding their own kind of Church.
1639–40 The Bishops’ Wars between Scotland and the king. When he is defeated, Charles calls the Short Parliament.
1642 Charles tries to arrest five MPs. The First Civil War begins, and the Battle of Edgehill is fought.
1643 Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters agree the Solemn League and Covenant.
1644 Parliament beats the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor. Oliver Cromwell suggests the Self-Denying Ordinance to keep politicians out of the war, and founds the New Model Army.
1645 Archbishop Laud is executed. Parliament wins the Battle of Naseby.
1646 King Charles surrenders. The New Model Army seizes him and sends him to the Isle of Wight.
1647–48 Scottish Engagers offer to help King Charles. The Second Civil War begins, but the Engagers are beaten at the Battle of Preston.
1649 King Charles I is beheaded by Parliament.
1650 Cromwell beats the Scots at the Battle of Dunbar.
1651 Prince Charles is defeated at Worcester and escapes, first to France, then Holland.
1652–54 The First Dutch War.
1655 Jamaica is seized from Spain.
1658 Oliver Cromwell dies. His son Richard becomes lord protector, but the next year the army takes over. As chaos threatens, General Monck takes control and invites the king back.
1660 Charles II is restored as king.
1665 The plague.
1666 The Great Fire of London.
1667 The Dutch defeat the English at the river Medway in the Second Dutch War.
1672–74 The Third Dutch War.
1678–79 Rumours of a “popish plot” to kill Charles and make his brother James king.
1679–81 Charles quarrels with Parliament. The Whigs try to stop his Catholic brother James becoming king in the Exclusion Crisis.
1683 Disappointed Whigs try to assassinate Charles and James in the Rye House Plot.
1685 Charles dies and James becomes King James II. The duke of Monmouth starts a rebellion but is defeated and executed.
1688 In the Glorious Revolution, James II is driven away by William of Orange, who becomes William III in 1689, while his wife, James’s daughter, becomes Queen Mary. From now on, Parliament meets every year. The Toleration Act is passed in 1689.
1690 William defeats James at the Battle of the Boyne.
Slavery
DESPITE all the arguments it had caused, the people of Britain were proud of their revolution. Their law courts were fair, and they chose the politicians who made their laws.
“We can say what we want and think what we please!” they boasted.
That may have been true, but in fact not everyone was allowed to vote in elections. Men had to own land or a house, and women weren’t allowed to vote at all. But even those who couldn’t vote joined in by cheering their favourite and booing their opponent.
“In other countries everyone does what the king tells them,” the British said. “But we’re free!”
So it was all the more sad that just when the British won their own freedom, they turned other people into slaves.
Slaves have no freedom at all. If you’re a slave, you belong to someone else, and your owner can starve or whip you just as he chooses. He can kill you if he wants, and no one will say a thing, because his slaves belong to him, just like sheep or cows. If he wants more slaves, he buys them. If he wants fewer, he sells them.
The Story of Britain Page 14