Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  The Declaration of Indulgence and the Third Dutch War, 1670–3

  By the end of the 1660s, Louis XIV was, to most Protestant Europeans, the living embodiment of royal absolutism and intolerant Catholicism, much as Philip II had been a century previously. His Protestant critics accused the Sun King of intending a universal Catholic monarchy dominating all Europe. This was probably an exaggeration. At first, Louis’s likely goal was simply to establish France, in succession to a declining Spain, as Europe’s greatest economic, military, and colonial power. But gradually, that ambition evolved into a more specific and grander scheme: the absorption of the Spanish Empire. Since the sixteenth century, Spain had governed a vast expanse of territory that included the southern or Spanish Netherlands (what is today Belgium), Portugal (to 1641), much of Italy, most of Central and South America, and the Philippines (see map 8, p. 131). In the later seventeenth century, this empire was ruled by a sickly and mentally incompetent invalid, Carlos II (1661–1700; reigned 1665–1700). Since Carlos had proven himself incapable of having children, a new royal line would inherit his empire when he died. Louis’s position, bolstered by his marriage to a Spanish princess, was “Why not Louis?” The resulting combination of French military power and Spanish wealth would make the Sun King the master of Europe.

  Obviously, Louis’s dream of uniting the two great Catholic powers was Protestant Europe’s worst nightmare. The Dutch republic, only recently free of Spanish domination, the sole continental Protestant state west of the Rhine, and a major trading rival of the French as well as the English, felt itself to be particularly vulnerable. When, in 1667, Louis’s armies swept into the Spanish Netherlands, the buffer zone between France and the Republic (see map 12), the Dutch hastily formed a Triple Alliance with Britain9 and Sweden to force Louis back. The Sun King was infuriated to discover that the road to Spain lay, militarily and politically if not geographically, through the Netherlands. The resulting wars threatened the very existence of the United Provinces. Some in the Dutch republic advised capitulation; they were opposed by the stadholder from 1672, William of Orange. William was determined to save the Republic, prevent Louis’s absorption of the Spanish Empire, and preserve the liberties of Europe. To accomplish this, he sought a Grand Alliance of European states to balance the ambitions of the Sun King. Observing the situation across the Channel at the end of the 1660s, many English men and women came to feel that the real danger to their liberties came not from the Protestant Dutch republic but from a vast Catholic conspiracy aimed at a world-encircling monarchy headed by Louis’s France. Worse, they worried that a crypto-Catholic regime in London was aiding and abetting that conspiracy.

  They were not far wrong. In 1669 Louis XIV, anxious to detach the British from the Dutch as a prelude to crushing the Republic, began to make discreet approaches to the English court through his sister-in-law, Henrietta Anne, duchess of Orléans (1644–70), who also happened to be Charles’s sister. The result was the Treaty of Dover of 1670. According to the public provisions of this treaty, Charles II’s British kingdoms would ally with France against the United Provinces in return for a payment of £225,000. Thus, each side got something it wanted. Louis broke the Anglo-Dutch alliance and acquired the use of the Royal Navy in the bargain. For Charles II, Louis’s subsidy meant that he would not have to ask parliamentary permission to raise an army. Freed from Parliament and possessed of an army, the king could pursue a new religious policy. And that was just the public side of the Treaty of Dover. According to a secret provision of the treaty known only to Charles, Arlington, and Clifford, the king had promised to convert publicly to Roman Catholicism. In return, Louis would supply an additional £150,000 and French troops should the Protestants in those kingdoms rebel. In other words, the Treaty of Dover was a risky attempt to solve the king’s constitutional, financial, religious, and military problems at one bold stroke.

  Map 12 Western Europe in the age of Louis XIV.

  What Charles intended by the secret provisions may never be known. Certainly he never attempted any public reconciliation with Rome. Some historians see the signing as a characteristic piece of duplicity, a promise of anything to get Louis to fork over the money. But Charles had to show some good faith on his side, and, in 1672, he acted. He proclaimed a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended penalties against both public Nonconformist and private Catholic worship. The king hoped that Dissenters would be so grateful to have their liberties restored that they would not mind similar liberties being extended to Catholics. In fact, many Dissenters and virtually all Anglicans seem to have felt that this was too high a price to pay. Local response to the 1672 Indulgence was generally negative: in at least one market town officials beat drums to drown out the voice of a Nonconformist preaching in the market place. To provide money for the war, the king also proclaimed the Stop of the Exchequer in 1671; that is, he suspended payment to those who had made loans to the government. This freed up funds to outfit the navy, but it also bankrupted a number of great merchant-financiers and ruined the Crown’s credit for years to come.

  Worse, the Third Dutch War went badly for the Anglo-French alliance. Though the French army nearly overran the Republic, it was itself driven back when the Dutch opened the Atlantic dykes, flooding their own country in order to save it. In open water, Charles’s Royal Navy performed poorly against the Dutch. Moreover, this half-hearted effort proved to be far more expensive than Charles or his ministers had anticipated. As a result, in February 1673, the king was forced to recall an angry Cavalier Parliament. It was no more sympathetic to the Declaration of Indulgence than it had been to Charles’s previous calls for toleration. It rejected the Indulgence and instead passed the Test Act. The Test Act was an extension of the Cavalier Code. It required all officeholders to deny transubstantiation and to take communion in an Anglican service. Dissenting officeholders could accommodate themselves, with some difficulty, to the law by the practice of occasional conformity (that is, taking the sacrament upon entering office and then attending their own services the rest of the time). But no good Catholic could ever deny transubstantiation or accept Anglican communion. As a result, the new law “smoked out” many secret Papists in government, including the lord high admiral, James, duke of York, and the lord treasurer, Lord Clifford, who were forced to resign their places. The outing of James as a Papist shocked the nation, raising the specter of a Catholic plot to subvert the constitution at home just as the Stuarts were helping the Bourbons to liquidate the Protestant Dutch and absorb the Spanish Empire abroad. These fears and revelations doomed the French alliance and the Cabal. In order to secure any supply from Parliament at all, the king made peace with the Dutch in 1674 and dismissed most of his ministry. For the moment, the Dutch republic had been saved, though its war with the French would drag on and Louis’s later incursions into Franche-Comté, Luxembourg, Lorraine, and Orange in 1679–88 would tighten the noose. Thus ended Charles II’s boldest attempt to solve the problems of sovereignty, religion, foreign policy, and finance.

  The Earl of Danby and the Court and Country Blocs, 1673–8

  By the early 1670s, popery and the French, not Dissent and the Dutch, had reemerged as the English people’s greatest nemeses. The king and royal family had also lost credit, for they stood revealed not only as pro-Catholic and pro-French but also as fiscally and militarily incompetent. In order to correct this public relations disaster, the king chose as his new lord treasurer and first minister a conservative Anglican, Sir Thomas Osborne (1632–1712), whom he soon elevated to the title Lord Osborne, and then in 1674, earl of Danby. Danby’s first task was to give the government and its policies enough of an Anglican face to defuse fears about Catholicism. He did this, first, by securing the appointment of like-minded Anglican and Royalist gentlemen to offices at both the center and in the localities. Second, he forged an alliance with the bishops to support the Church in general and to persecute Catholics and Dissenters in particular. The period of Danby’s ministry saw the strictest e
nforcement of the Cavalier Code yet: Catholics were fined, Dissenting services were broken up, and repeat offenders imprisoned. Third, he insisted that James’s two daughters, Princesses Mary and Anne, be raised as Anglicans and, when old enough, marry Protestants. In 1677 Mary wed William of Orange, Louis XIV’s greatest enemy. Six years later, Anne married Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708), who had also distinguished himself as a military leader and a fervent Protestant.

  These marriages had both foreign policy and domestic implications. The Dutch marriage, in particular, was the linchpin in a new Protestant alliance against Louis XIV. On the domestic front, both unions did much to allay English fears of James’s religion and, in particular, a Catholic succession. After all, James was nearly as old as his brother and, since he was thought to be in less robust health, he might never succeed to the throne. Even if he did become king, his reign would be short, followed by that of one of his two Anglican daughters and her Protestant spouse. It was true that, following the death of his first wife, Anne née Hyde, duchess of York (b. 1637) in 1671, he had married another young Catholic princess, Mary Beatrice of Modena (1658–1718) in 1673. If Mary Beatrice produced a son, that child would take precedence over James’s female heirs, Mary and Anne. But as the 1670s progressed into the 1680s she experienced a series of obstetrical mishaps that appeared to render this possibility remote. Therefore, a Protestant succession seemed assured in the long run, whatever the short term might bring.

  Danby’s second great task was to restore the regime’s financial credit. Though the debts owed before the Stop of the Exchequer were never fully repaid, the new lord treasurer did what he could to cut expenditure and raise revenue. Danby was most successful on the revenue side. He continued the Treasury Commission’s reforms of the Customs, Excise, and Hearth Tax services.10 He also had a stroke of luck. Because the French and the Dutch continued to fight, their share of trade fell to the English who, being neutral, could do business with both sides. As a result, English commerce boomed and the yield from the Customs, in particular, swelled. Still, Charles II’s expenditure continued to outrun his income. Danby’s attempts to restrain the king’s extravagance only made enemies for him among the ravenous army of mistresses and courtiers.

  The final recourse open to Danby was to try to persuade the Cavalier Parliament to vote more taxes. We have seen how the lord treasurer tried to win them over by pursuing the Anglican religious and foreign policies described above. He also sought to appeal to both their pride and their pocketbooks by offering court offices, pensions, secret service payments, and favors to peers and MPs, in return for their votes. In short, Danby sought to build up a “court” bloc in Parliament by buying it. Yet, he could never bribe enough members to form a majority; nor is it clear that he could always count on the votes of those on his payroll. He therefore had to rely on his Anglican and reformist policies to convince the remainder.

  But there was one group of MPs whom he could never convince. This was made up of old Parliamentarians, many with Roundhead backgrounds and Dissenting sympathies, who eventually came under the leadership of Lord Ashley, now earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was one of those nimble politicians who had managed to serve first Cromwell, then Charles II. After the Cabal’s fall in 1673 he began to organize an opposition to Danby’s government. This opposition criticized court luxury and waste; Danby’s bribery of Parliament; the king’s manipulation of the judiciary, his desire for a standing army and his sympathy with France and Catholicism; the growing influence of the bishops and Church courts; and the resulting persecution of Dissenters. In their view, royal power as wielded by the Danby administration was increasing alarmingly, to the point where it threatened the political and religious constitution of England. In 1677, poet and MP Andrew Marvell (1621–78) charged that “[t]here has now for diverse years a design been carried on to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant religion into downright Popery.”11 In making this charge, Shaftesbury’s group claimed to represent “the country,” that is, the true interests and views of the vast majority of the landed aristocracy. In fact, because their views were still associated with republicanism and Civil War violence, the country group was a minority within the political elite, of some influence among London’s merchants and artisans perhaps, but unable to win majorities in the Cavalier Parliament. They needed a more specific, pressing issue in order to prove that they did, indeed, represent the best interests of the political nation at large. In August 1678, they got it.

  The Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis, and Loss of Local Control, 1678–81

  Toward the end of the summer of 1678, a defrocked preacher named Titus Oates (1649–1705) approached the government with claims of a Catholic plot to kill Charles II, replace him with his brother James, raise English and Irish Catholics against their Protestant neighbors, and bring over a French army to restore Roman Catholicism. To their credit, no one in authority took this story seriously at first. Oates was not exactly a monument of veracity: starting out as an Anabaptist, he was eventually expelled from the Merchant Taylors’ School, two Cambridge colleges, two Anglican livings, the Royal Navy, and, finally, two Jesuit Colleges for a variety of offenses ranging from lying to drunkenness to sodomy! Belief in the Popish Plot only gained momentum because of a series of terrible coincidences. First, James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman (1636–78), was found to have been corresponding secretly with the French court about reestablishing Catholicism. Second, in mid-October the JP who first interrogated Oates, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (1621–78), was found in a ditch run through with his own sword. In fact, the evidence for foul play is ambiguous – Godfrey’s death remains one of the great “murder” mysteries in English history. But coming as it did after these other accusations, his untimely end seemed to contemporaries yet more evidence of a sinister international Catholic plot. Suddenly, people took Oates’s story seriously. Anti-Catholic hysteria flourished. Rumors flew of Catholics secretly arming themselves, of bombs being planted in Protestant churches, of “night riders” – presumably Catholic spies – criss-crossing the country, of French and Spanish troops landing on the coasts. As a result, Catholic houses were searched, Catholics were forbidden the court, London streets were blocked off, and the trained bands and militia called out.

  In fact, historians now know that Oates’s plot was a tissue of lies and that the English Catholic community in 1678 was small – about 1 percent of the population – and more apolitical than ever before. But Charles’s subjects could not or would not see this. What they did see was that the Catholic powers, France in particular, were on the march in Europe. As one historian notes, “between 1590 and 1690 protestantism was reduced from one-half to one-fifth of … the continent.”12 They saw popery flourishing at court as never before. Above all, Oates’s charges played brilliantly on a long heritage of anti-Catholic fear and suspicion by recalling the Northern and Ridolfi Plots of 1569–72, the Armada of 1588, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the burning of London of 1666 (which the government had cynically blamed on Catholics), and the machinations of 1670–3. In short, most of the political nation saw the plot as yet one more piece of evidence confirming their worst fears and prejudices. Their response was swift and decisive: prominent Catholics were arrested on charges of high treason and subjected to kangaroo trials in which presiding judges admitted hearsay evidence and ridiculed defense witnesses. (In fact, such badgering was common in treason trials throughout the century.) Overall, some two dozen people were executed either for complicity in the supposed plot or for officiating as priests, which was prosecuted as a capital crime at this time. Even the queen was accused of trying to poison the king, a charge at which Charles II scoffed. But not every unlikely charge proved false: in the third terrible coincidence of 1678, the arch-Anglican and supposedly anti-French earl of Danby was discovered to have written to Louis asking for money so as to avoid recalling Parliament.

  The
king tried to save his first minister – impeachment might expose the real Popish “plot” of his further transactions with Louis XIV – by dissolving Parliament. That was a mistake. Now Shaftesbury and his country group not only had their issue – a Catholic plot against Church and State – but also an election with which to take that issue to the voters of England. They ran on a platform of anti-popery, anti-France, and anti-arbitrary and corrupt government. Ultimately, those agendas collapsed into one: to exclude James, duke of York, from the succession to the throne because he was a Catholic. The next few years have come to be known as the Exclusion Crisis, during which three general elections produced three Parliaments. The Exclusion Parliaments would debate whether to alter the hereditary succession or limit the powers of a popish successor. But since these elections were the first in England in almost two decades, they were, in fact, more than a referendum on Exclusion. They put the entire reign on trial. In the course of that trial there emerged two sets of loyalties, based roughly on the country and court groups but coalescing into well-organized, almost modern, political parties: the Whigs and the Tories.