The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  Freedom, Locke went on to argue, came most seriously under threat when those in authority used their power to attack the property of their own citizens. As he re-read that passage in exile he can only have thought of James Duke of York.

  ‘[This] is not so much to be feared in governments where the legislative consists ... in assemblies ... But in Governments where the legislative is ... in one man, as in absolute Monarchies ... [they] will be apt to increase their own riches and power, by taking what they think fit, from the People.’8

  What rights did the citizen retain to protect him from this threat? None, Robert Filmer said. Rebellion was worse than tyranny; passive obedience was the subject’s lot. Locke’s answer was quite different. The executive took its power not from God, he argued, but by the gift of free citizens. Abuse it, and he forfeited that power, his contract with the people was dissolved, and all returned to the original ‘state of nature’.

  State of Nature, Original Contract – such phrases were common currency among the exiles. So was the Right of Resistance, much discussed at the Croom Elbow coffee house by men who pleaded, with Locke, that a King who broke his contract was ‘guilty of the greatest crime a man is capable of ... is justly to be esteemed the common Enemy and Pest of Mankind; and is to be treated accordingly’.9 None of the exiles doubted their right to remove England’s new tyrant, James II. Nor did they question the instrument they had to use. The Duke of Monmouth had been Shaftesbury’s candidate and he would be theirs. In the spring of 1685 John Locke wrote letters to England about buying ‘seeds’ and ‘lime trees’. Were those canting references to money and guns? Some scholars think so. When Locke went into hiding soon afterwards, he chose the name Dr van der Linden – Dr ‘Lime-trees’. Money certainly passed through Locke’s hands. His first host, Thomas Dare, also acted as banker to the Duke of Monmouth, who held meetings at his house. And it was there Robert Ferguson read out to assembled exiles the declaration he had written on Monmouth’s behalf to initiate an uprising in England.

  Monmouth himself had fallen in with the rebels’ plans almost casually. Had Charles not warned his disgraced son that ‘Locke and Ferguson were the causes of [his] misfortune and would ruin [him]’?10 Only weeks before, Monmouth had wondered about joining the armies of the Emperor Leopold to fight the Ottomans. Perhaps Austria would have been a better destination for the ‘excellent soldier and dancer’ who had spent the previous summer dancing with his cousin Mary at the Prince of Orange’s hunting lodge at Dieren. Monmouth made his decision, however. He pawned his jewels to buy guns, and threw in his lot with the rebels.

  Ferguson’s declaration promised religious toleration, annual parliaments, and a free convention to settle England’s future. Robert Ferguson was one of the few who planned to sail with Monmouth. Everyone had seen how the crowds turned out for him in 1680. It seemed unlikely he would need a great army. From London, John Wildman promised an uprising of 10,000 men. The tyrant would be removed and contract government established in his place. On 30 May 1685 Monmouth set sail with just three ships and 82 companions.

  In the country town of Axminster, a Congregationalist minister called Stephen Towgood* heard the news of Monmouth’s landing at Lyme Regis, and in his congregation’s Book of Remembrance solemnly recorded his liberation. ‘Now,’ he wrote, ‘[the people of God] hoped that the day was come in which the Good Old Cause of God and religion that had lain as dead and buried for a long time would revive again.’11

  The Good Old Cause – that was the cause the Puritans had fought for forty years before, the cause of God and Parliament, of the levellers and ranters, of the men who had killed a King. For Dissenters of that sort, the years since the Restoration had been a time of persecution, and since the Exclusion Crisis their sufferings had increased. Stephen Towgood’s congregation met out in the woods, or crouched in rows of houses with holes cut between them so the Minister’s voice could be heard. More than a thousand Quakers were in jail, John Whiting among them. Perhaps the time of trial was now over. The poet Jane Barker remembered her Presbyterian neighbour muttering secret prayers: Preserve thy holy servant Monmouth, Lord! Who carries for his shield thy sacred word.12 In London, a young Dissenter called Daniel Defoe hurried to join Monmouth’s army. ‘Now’, wrote Stephen Towgood, before packing his own bible to set out, ‘were the hearts of the people of God gladdened and their hopes and expectations raised that this man might be a deliverer for the nation, and the interest of Christ in it, who had been even harassed out with trouble and persecution, and even broken with the weight of oppression under which they had long groaned.’13 The Saints were on the march again.

  Few rushed to join them. A theatre song set to music by Henry Purcell that summer underlined the continuing problem with Monmouth’s candidacy for the throne:

  ‘Rebel Jimmy Scott,

  That did to Empire soar;

  His Father might be the Lord knows what,

  But his Mother was (his mother was)

  A whore, a whore, a whore, a whore, a whore, a whore.’14

  Nor was illegitimacy the only obstacle to Monmouth’s rebellion. During the Exclusion Crisis James had seemed the cause of the problem while Monmouth offered a route out of it. Now James was King and Monmouth a usurper. The Good Old Cause, meanwhile, were words which sent a shiver down England’s collective spine. To most people who remembered the Puritans, ‘religion so furious ... [was] found to be mere hypocrisy ... an engine of power and tyranny ... and various forms of tyranny succeeding one another, and everyone fleecing the people with taxes and oppressions’.15

  Besides, James’s first months on the throne had been far better than anyone had expected. His public celebration of mass had been a shock, certainly, but there had followed a meeting of the Privy Council at which he made a speech designed to allay everyone’s fears. ‘I have been reported to be a man for arbitrary power,’ he told the assembled councillors,

  ‘[but] I shall make it my endeavour to preserve the government in Church and State as it is by law established. I know the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy, and that the members of it have shewn themselves good and loyal subjects, and therefore I shall always take care to defend and support it. I know likewise that the laws of England are sufficient to make the King as great a monarch as I can wish, and therefore as I will never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the crown, so I will never invade any man’s property.’16

  The sense of relief was palpable. Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, was so relieved that he asked the King’s permission to write down the speech from memory, ‘which the King agreeing to, he went to the clerk’s seat and did it accordingly’.17 Here was a pledge to calm Tory fears. James’s words were published; Sir John Reresby, a Tory leader in Yorkshire, thought it was this speech ‘which in a great measure did quiet the minds and apprehensions of people’.18 ‘Infinite industry,’ John Evelyn now ascribed to his testy, humourless monarch, ‘sedulity, gravity, and great understanding & experience of affairs ... I cannot but predict much happiness ... Certainly never such a Prince had this nation.’19 The King then summoned a parliament – Roger and Dudley North among its MPs – and repeated his pledge in the same words, ‘the better to evidence to you, that I spoke them not by chance’. In its loyal delight, Parliament responded by voting the new King generous revenues for life. For all his lack of parliamentary experience, Dudley North played a leading role in that.

  ‘At the committee when the Bill was gone over paragraph by paragraph, he sat by the table with the draught and a pen in his hand dictating amendments ... and divers of the old members were diverted by seeing a fresh man, and half foreigner, act his part in Parliament so well.’20

  By contrast, signs of the factious past were still around them. The previous page in the Commons records was filled with the Bill for Excluding James Duke of York to Inherit the Imperial Crown of England, and, on the day before the session opened, Titus Oates was paraded around Westminster Hall with a board around his neck
reciting his perjuries. Few wanted to return to the time of rebellion.

  Daniel Defoe remembered bitterly ‘how boldly abundance of men talked for the Duke of Monmouth when he first landed; but if half of them had as boldly joined him sword in hand, he had never been routed’.21 There was no uprising in London. Suspects and Dissenters were rounded up; patrols on the Thames stopped anyone slipping away to join the rebel army. There was no flood of followers to the Duke’s standard, only the last stalwarts of the Good Old Cause come to fight the final battle of the Civil War. Perhaps the return of civil war was the greatest terror, in the end, for a whole generation of Englishmen. John Evelyn, a great lover of peace, captured the public mood after the uprising was over:

  ‘For my own part I looked upon this deliverance as absolutely most signal; such an inundation of fanatics and men of impious principles,* must needs have caused universal disorder, cruelty, injustice, rapine, sacrilege & confusion, an unavoidable civil war, and misery without end.’22

  The last time John Whiting had seen Monmouth he was smiling and laughing in a crowd of wellwishers. When he saw him again in Taunton, two weeks after the landing, Whiting ‘thought he looked very thoughtful and dejected in his countenance, and thinner than when I saw him four years before ... [so] that I hardly knew him again, and was sorry for him as I looked at him’.23 At Norton St Philip, his followers found Monmouth ‘so dejected that we could hardly get orders from him’. He proclaimed himself King and accused James of poisoning Charles II, but in London James’s loyal parliament offered ‘to assist and stand by His Majesty with their lives and fortunes against the Duke of Monmouth and all Rebels and Traitors’. At Frome came news of the defeat and capture of the Earl of Argyll, who had led a parallel uprising in Scotland. The complex pieces of England’s political jigsaw puzzle had not fallen into place for James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.

  Monmouth toyed with flight, but decided to play his game through to the final hand. In London he had been building a grand new palace at the south end of Soho Square. As it happened, Soho Square had played an uncanny part in England’s recent political troubles. It was in one of its unfinished houses that the bloodstained sedan chair which carried Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’s corpse was said to have been dumped; the Rye House Plot had been planned there, while another resident, Ford Grey, was Monmouth’s commander of horse. Perhaps thinking of such connections, the Duke gave Soho as the password as his troops marched in silence at 11pm on Sunday 5 July towards Sedgemoor and the last pitched battle ever fought on English soil. Monmouth’s final gamble was a night attack on the royal troops. Few of his men were trained, but their faith sustained them. In an earlier skirmish Stephen Towgood had seen ‘the Lord eminently appear ... filling this new army with wonderful courage, and sending an hornet of fear amongst those that came to oppose them’.24

  The leader of James’s army was Louis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, French Protestant by birth, a personal friend of the new King, and a nephew of James’s hero, the great French Marshal Turenne. Roger North had met him on the night in 1678 when his chambers were destroyed in a great fire at the Temple, and Feversham and Monmouth, by coincidence, were the two ‘Great Men’ who came to direct operations. Feversham stood too close to a fuse that night, which ‘happened to take, and a beam fell on his head, for which he was obliged to undergo the trepan’.25 Perhaps that had affected Feversham’s powers. He was generally thought idle; when Monmouth’s attack came he was asleep. His deputy, though, was a rising military star. John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, was another close friend of James’s (and yet another student of Turenne). When Churchill’s cavalry approached, John Whiting remembered, ‘Terror march’d before them, for we could hear their horses grind the ground under their feet, almost a mile before they came.’26

  As Monmouth’s men crept up a steep slope towards Feversham’s army they stumbled into a ditch, someone’s pistol went off, and surprise, their only weapon, was lost. The cavalry were the first to break. Daylight revealed a scene of carnage as the men of the Good Old Cause tried to make their escape. ‘Our men are still killing them in the corn and hedges and ditches whither they are crept’,27 scribbled a loyalist officer in an exhausted note home. Monmouth had turned his back upon the enemy by then (‘too soon’, thought Gilbert Burnet, among others, ‘for a man of courage, who had such high pretensions’28). With three companions, he headed first for Weston-super-Mare, then for the south coast. They split up; Monmouth swapped clothes with a shepherd. On 8 July, swaying with fatigue, the son of Charles II took refuge under a hedge as dawn broke. There an old woman named Amy Farrant pointed him out to the militia a few hours later.

  Colonel William Legge was charged with taking Monmouth back to London. He had orders to stab him if there were any disturbances on the road. From the prisoner’s pockets he removed ‘several charms that were tied about him when he was taken, and his tablebook, which was full of astrological figures that nobody could understand’.29 Someone else reached Westminster Steps at the same time – one of James’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, the warm-hearted and quicktempered Thomas Bruce, Earl of Ailesbury.

  ‘I, coming from the City by water, unfortunately landed at the same moment, and saw him led up the other stairs on Westminster side lean and pale, and with a disconsolate physiognomy, with soldiers with pistols in their hands ... I wished heartily and often since that I had not seen him, for I could never get him out of my mind for years.’30

  Facing death, Monmouth lost all control. He wrote to James begging for his life, and blaming his treason on evil counsellors. The charms he carried with him included spells to open locked prison doors; maybe he had a premonition of how his adventure would end. Others had certainly foretold his fate. The story was told how a French nobleman in London had seen Monmouth enter the theatre some years before, and convulsively ‘cried out to some sitting in the same box: Voilà, Messieurs, comme il entre sans tête.’31

  His undignified pleas for mercy rejected, frustrated even in his request for an extra day of life, Monmouth walked out onto the scaffold at Tower Hill on 15 July. He refused to repent of his scandalous relationship with Henrietta Lady Wentworth. He admitted there was no proof his mother had ever married Charles II.

  ‘Then he lay down; and soon after he raised himself upon his elbow, and said to the executioner, “Prithee let me feel the axe.” He felt the edge and said, “I fear it is not sharp enough.”’

  ‘Executioner: It is sharp enough and heavy enough.’32

  But it took five blows to remove his head.

  The man James sent to witness the execution was George Legge, Earl of Dartmouth and brother of the officer who had escorted Monmouth to London. Dartmouth was one of the King’s closest friends, and when it was all over he returned to court to report. The pretender was gone, but that was not the full extent of James’s good fortune. The Republicans of the Good Old Cause had lost their final battle. The Whig opponents of prerogative power had been driven either into the political wilderness or foreign exile. There was no one left to challenge the King’s power. If he wished to establish absolutism in England, as the Whigs warned, or to turn the nation back to Rome (not that the staunchly Anglican Dartmouth would have welcomed that), then there was no one to stop him. With one exception, perhaps. ‘He had got rid of one enemy,’ Dartmouth told James, ‘but had still remaining a much more considerable and dangerous one.’33 He meant the King’s own nephew and son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange, Stadholder of the United Provinces.

  To him we will turn in due course. But first it is time to take stock of a different kind of revolution. For perhaps, after all, the greatest upheaval then taking place in England was not the rumbling constitutional saga, but the transformation of London from a middling European capital into ‘the largest and best built and richest city in the world’.34

  IV

  ‘THE RICHEST CITY IN THE WORLD’

  The Duke of Monmouth was not the only one whose great adventure finished on Tower Hill on
15 July 1685. The executioner’s axe also ended the dreams of Richard Frith, bricklayer, property developer, and citizen of London.

  Had visitors to Monmouth House gathered in the same spot just ten years earlier, they would have found themselves in fields divided by the palings of market gardens. The cluster of roofs some distance to the west marked a country inn which would one day be on Wardour Street; further to the left lay the walled gardens of the great mansions along Piccadilly, and the roofs of the fashionable new quarter of St James’s; due south, scaffolding poles and unfinished brick walls indicated where Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) was rising out of the ground. When Dudley North returned home in April 1680 he found many things changed in England, and most dramatic of all was the transformation of London. His last visit home had been in 1666, to an overgrown medieval city of jetties and alleyways. When he took ship for Smyrna a few months later that city was gone, two-thirds of the area within the walls destroyed by the Great Fire, and Dudley left behind him a field of charred beams and smoking rubble. Fourteen years later, on his way from the docks to Francis’s house, he found himself walking through a new world.