The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  The object was not an authentic recreation of Chinese life. When Louis Le Vau built the Trianon de Porcelaine at Versailles, his homage to the Porcelain Pagoda at Nanking, the result was not a pagoda but an oddball baroque palace with blue and white roof-tiles.* It was not long, indeed, before the East India Companies specified patterns to their buyers in the orient, and then sent out their own ‘chinese’ designs for oriental craftsmen to imitate. But it was this very feature of the new style, its ability to be reproduced, that gave it such profound consequences. Manufacturers began to experiment commercially as they looked for ways to make cheap replicas available to a wider public. Delft swapped an ailing brewing industry for potteries producing blue and white ‘china’ (the secret of porcelain itself would remain locked in the east for some years longer). Lambeth copied Delft. John Stalker and George Parker produced an entire volume of Patterns for Japan-work in imitation of the Indians for tables, stands, frames, cabinets etc. Dutch lacquer soon became indistinguishable from imported work. This was the ‘ingenious age’ of science, and inventors turned their attention to luxury, with patents being registered for everything from fine paper and imitation marble to gold thread and plate glass windows. Meanwhile, new fashions also generated a whole new cabinet of miniaturised luxury objects, from coffee pots to tea caddies, saucers to spoons, which Soho’s Huguenots made, and on which London could lavish its growing wealth. Style could be reproduced, as bullion could not.

  Commerce drove this acceleration of fashion, and the multiplication of shops in Soho, as it drove the expansion of the world to China and India. ‘Not only Sweden and Denmark,’ William Temple observed, ‘but France and England have more particularly than ever before busied the thoughts and councils of their several governments ... about the matters of trade.’9 Governments, indeed, were becoming increasingly aware of what Amsterdam took for granted. Commercial rivalry between England and the Dutch had already caused three wars between them, while their respective East India Companies were still engaged in bitter competition over markets in India. It might have surprised the anxious MPs hurrying away from Parliament in November 1685 to learn how their monarch saw himself. His aim, he would later write in his memoirs,§§ was ‘to engross the trade of the world, while foreign states destroyed each other’.10

  England’s new King certainly showed a greater interest in trade than any of his predecessors. Packed off to Edinburgh during the Exclusion Crisis, James had promoted a free trade area to cover the whole island of Britain. As Duke of York he had become involved in a number of commercial ventures. With his cousin Prince Rupert, the once-dashing Civil War cavalryman, he launched ‘The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa’, and as Governor chaired weekly board meetings in his Whitehall rooms. After the Royal Adventurers collapsed, a new Royal African Company emerged, again with James as Governor. It would be largely responsible for development of the English slave trade, and was soon ‘exporting’ five thousand Africans a year to the West Indies.

  The Royal African Company, the East India Company, the Royal Fishery Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company (in which James was also involved) were all joint stock companies: associations of investors, limited in number, who staked out a commercial territory and received a royal charter to guarantee their monopoly. In the 1680s this still appeared to be the prime model for commercial success. Child’s East India Company developed ties with the Stuart Court which well illustrated how trade and government could be interlinked. By the end of his reign the King would have large investments in the Company, from which he would receive £10,000 a year; in return, the Company’s monopoly would be upheld against interlopers and commercial rivals – not least thanks to legal judgements by the ever-loyal George Jeffreys.

  James’s enthusiasm for the Companies, however, did not reflect general good relations between the Stuart courts and the City. There were many in the City – particularly Whig Dissenters like Thomas Papillon – who held to the Dutch assumption that monarchy and trade were incompatible. For evidence they pointed to the events of 1672, when Charles II’s ‘Stop of the Exchequer’, reneging on interest payments, had ruined the City’s biggest financier, Edward Backwell, alienated all financial interests, and sown a lasting legacy of distrust between Whitehall and Guildhall. The ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ provided inexhaustible ammunition for those who thought Kings could not nourish trade.

  Two years later, Papillon had put his name to a Scheme of Trade promoting a switch in Government alignment from France towards Holland. That petition was the first sign of a strong and coherent grouping of new financiers in the City. Michael and Benjamin Godfrey, brothers of the murdered Popish Plot magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, signed the Scheme, as did Jean Dubois, the Sheriff later deposed along with Papillon, John Houblon, later the first governor of the Bank of England, his brother James, and Patience Ward, Lord Mayor of London during the Exclusion Crisis, who would go into exile with Thomas Papillon. Indeed, alongside the Exclusion Crisis ran a parallel commercial dispute about the nature of trade, and of its relationship with government. For by the time Dudley North returned to England in 1680, the Company model of protected trade was being challenged. There were those who wanted markets liberated not only from Kings but from monopolies as well. In Holland, Pieter de la Court railed against the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, holding up the unrestricted Greenland trade as an example of lower costs, rising profits and an expanding industry. In England, the challenge came from Thomas Papillon.

  Papillon was vice-governor of the East India Company. London was then rich on expanding trade, but the East India, like all the Companies, was a closed shop which debarred further investors. Threatened with competition in 1681, Papillon proposed that the Company should expand its base to allow in new investors. Child contested Papillon’s proposal and received the backing of the Duke of York; the Company remained closed. Royal victory in the Exclusion Crisis was accompanied by commercial victory for the Duke of York’s preferred model of protected trade. In 1683, just as Thomas Papillon was driven into exile, the East India Company’s charter was renewed and the threat of competition snuffed out in the courts.

  The political fault-lines of the Exclusion Crisis ran close alongside commercial differences. It was not simply that Whigs espoused trade and Tories rejected it, although there was such a tendency among Tory landowners (‘There is not any sort of people so inclinable to seditious practices as the trading part of the nation,’11 was one common view). It was not simply that ‘free’ countries promoted trade while absolute monarchs suppressed it – despite what Dutch republicans and English Whigs believed. In fact, the new monarchs were eager to harness trade expansion to their own glory, and Colbert worked tirelessly to expand the French Companies for Louis XIV. What was at issue between the two sides was the nature of these new economies. Which model could best exploit the expanding world of trade? Would markets be controlled by Government or would they be free?

  Such were the economic undercurrents which flowed beneath the political disputes of James’s reign. What no one doubted, however, was that England in the 1680s appeared wealthier than ever before. The homes, hides and heads of the fashionable had all been transformed. Their wigs, their coats, their handkerchiefs, their canes, their coffee houses and punch bowls, their houses, furniture, mirrors, toilet stands, perfumes, presents, even their underwear – all would have been unrecognisable at the time of the Restoration twenty-five years before. In the coming revolution both sides would claim to represent ancient continuities. The world they were fighting over, however, looked startlingly, unmistakably new.

  X

  ‘ALL ENGINES NOW AT WORK TO BRING IN POPERY AMAIN’

  ‘The Lord Jesus defend his little flock and preserve this threatened Church and nation.’

  John Evelyn, 17 January 1687

  On 21 March 1686 Soho’s new residents flooded into the streets to witness the consecration of their parish church. A memorial of the day survives in the name of a Soho t
horoughfare, Old Compton Street. The man coming to consecrate St Anne’s was Henry Compton, an energetic fifty-four-year-old bachelor of royalist background, who had been Bishop of London since 1675. After nine years of building, Soho was finished. Gregory King’s trenches had been transformed into terraces of modern housing. Soho Square was gradually losing its grisly reputation and turning into a fashionable centre, while the streets around it filled up with French craftsmen. Compton had lobbied vigorously on behalf of Huguenot refugees and many of Soho’s French residents turned out to cheer him. Mindful of Richard Frith’s high-profile bankruptcy, Henry Compton had also checked that all workmen on the church had been paid before he agreed to attend. With his own cathedral of St Paul’s still rising at the top of Ludgate Hill, Compton must have been used to building sites. What the bishop did not realise, as he processed towards St Anne’s that day, was that he himself was about to become the focal point of the first major confrontation between the King of England and the Anglican Church.

  Compton had already crossed swords with James. Four months earlier he had been dismissed from the Privy Council for questioning the King’s right to dispense Catholic officers from the Test. The new clash began when the King criticised Dr John Sharp, minister at St Giles-in-the-Fields and a rising church star, for attacking Catholicism in his sermons. James demanded Sharp be dismissed; Henry Compton refused. As a Catholic, albeit notional head of the church, the King was unable to discipline Compton. He therefore announced the formation of an ‘Ecclesiastical Commission’ to punish the Bishop of London on his behalf. A year after the coronation, James had set himself on a course of direct confrontation with the Church of England. The Catholic King wanted a senior Anglican bishop removed from office.

  ‘I could know his griefs by his discourse’,1 wrote Roger North, who was summoned to Lambeth Palace to give legal advice on the controversy to Archbishop Sancroft. They were grim meetings. A year before, Sancroft had pledged allegiance to the King; now he had been instructed to sit on the Ecclesiastical Commission which would discipline his bishop. Church and crown were the twin guardians which secured England from chaos. How could one be set against another? If he obeyed James, the Archbishop would destroy the church; refuse him and he would be a rebel. Up and down the country, Tories reacted to James’s establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission in sheer bewilderment. They saw themselves as the ‘loyal party’, the men who had supported James through the Exclusion Crisis. How could he respond by attacking their Church? What of the pledges he had made at the beginning of his reign? And what, most important of all, would come next? Could James really be planning to impose ‘popery and arbitrary government’ on England after all?

  Sir William Temple had once told Charles II why such a project could never succeed:

  ‘That the universal bent of the nation was against both; that ... it could not be changed here but by force of an army ... that the Roman Catholics in England were not the hundredth part of the nation ... and it seemed against all common sense, to think by one part, to govern ninety-nine ... that the force, seeming necessary to subdue the liberties and spirits of this nation, could not be esteemed less than an army of threescore thousand men.’2

  But summer 1686 saw James’s army camped on Hounslow Heath for the second year running. The soldiers were not all Catholics, of course, but James now despatched a zealous Catholic, the Earl of Tyrconnel, to take control of military affairs in Ireland, and the Tory Earl of Clarendon was recalled soon afterwards. Barillon informed Paris of a group of Catholics at court, ‘whom the King of England consults, and who often meet at Lord Sunderland’s to deliberate upon matters that offer ... a sort of Council, independent of any other, and in which the most important resolutions are taken’.3 Tories could hardly fail to notice that, and one man in particular, Father Petre (or Peters), was increasingly spoken of as the King’s éminence grise. London was soon full of vitriolic stories about the Jesuit who wanted to turn England to Rome:

  ‘Tall and slender, fawning looks, flattering smiles, a false heart, deceitful tongue ... Very loyal, but very unstable; very devout, but very treacherous ... He is about the age of sixty, but as wanton as at thirty: more subject to lust than loyalty, and ... more subject to lucre than either.’4

  As if the conversion of England had to begin in his own court, James took to button-holing courtiers and engaging them in theological debate. They developed various ways of shrugging him off. Colonel Kirke told James he had once promised the King of Morocco ‘that if ever he changed his religion he would turn Mahometan’.5 The Earl of Rochester, younger of the Hyde brothers, pleaded that he had to consider not merely politics but his soul. In response the King burst into embarrassing tears and replied, ‘Oh! Lord, Oh, you must needs!’6

  Archbishop Sancroft followed both Roger North’s advice and the dimly-lit path suggested by his own conscience. He refused to serve on the Ecclesiastical Commission. Suddenly, unaccountably, King and establishment were at loggerheads.

  John Evelyn was a Commissioner for the Privy Seal that year, while the Earl of Clarendon was still in Ireland, and in his diaries he recorded the mounting sense of panic among Tories as the King steered the nation remorselessly into uncharted water. ‘All engines ... now at work to bring in popery amain’,7 he wrote in May. At the heart of the King’s challenge to the status quo was his use of prerogative powers to dispense Catholics from the Test Act. James decided to test those powers in court and Evelyn watched the odd little pantomime played out when Sir Edward Hales, a friend of the King and recent Catholic convert, refused the Test and was ‘informed on’ by his coachman, Godden. Lord Chief Justice Herbert might have been reading from Edmund Bohun’s new edition of Patriarcha when he ruled

  ‘that the laws of England are the King’s laws; that kings have the sole power of dispensing with the penal laws in cases of necessity ... that they do not derive their power from the people, nor can on any account or pretence be lawfully deprived of it.’8

  ‘At which every body were astonished,’ Evelyn recorded; ‘by which the Test was abolished! Times of great jealousies, where these proceedings would end.’ If Godden vs Hales really meant that the Test Act had lost its power, then James had removed the Church of England’s main line of defence, the rampart which made it supreme in England’s religious life. The King seemed unconcerned. James opened a lavish new Catholic chapel with baroque angels carved by Grinling Gibbons;* Evelyn came away ‘not believing I should ever have lived to see such things in the K[ing] of England’s palace’.9 On 8 September Henry Compton was finally suspended from his duties as Bishop of London. In the winter of 1686 James even began summoning MPs to his private closet to make them pledge their votes to a formal repeal of the Test Act in Parliament. Those who refused found themselves summarily put out of their jobs.

  Catholics took their places. Tyrconnel was made Lord Deputy of Catholic Ireland. The Earl of Rochester resigned in January 1687, and when his post of Lord Treasurer was put into commission, two of the Commissioners were Catholics. ‘Popish Justices of Peace established in all Counties’, Evelyn wrote on 17 January, unable to contain his anger and fear any longer,

  ‘Judges ignorant of the law, and perverting it: so furiously does the Jesuit drive ... God of his infinite mercy open our Eyes, & turn our hearts, establish his Truth, with peace: The L Jesus Defend his little flock, & preserve this threatened Church & nation.’

  Did James really intend to convert England? That was what the Earl of Sunderland, an increasingly powerful figure at Court, appeared to tell French ambassador Barillon.

  ‘[The King] has nothing so much at heart, as to establish the Catholic religion ... Without it he will never be in safety, and always exposed to the indiscreet zeal of those who will heat the people against the Catholic religion as long as it is not fully established.’10

  That was the rumour across Europe. William Carstares, a Scottish political exile, shared a coach to Bruges with a ‘priest, who discoursing with me in Latin about the af
fairs of England, told me that he did believe there would be a change of religion there’.11

  ‘His Majesty, God bless him! one of the zealousest’, wrote one Catholic of the King’s Easter devotions, ‘Ten hours a day sometimes!’12 It was certainly the impression that the fearful English received from their King. But perhaps by ‘establish’, James meant no more than to raise his co-religionists to full civil rights and safeguard them from persecution. He was in his mid-fifties. He knew he might not have much time to do for them what he could.

  Or maybe his assumptions were more straightforward than anyone imagined. James sincerely believed in the truth of the Catholic Church. He had no doubt that ‘did others inquire into the religion as I have done, without prejudice or prepossession or partial affection, they would be of the same mind in point of religion as I am’.13 Remove the Anglican monopoly on religion, he told d’Adda, the Papal Nuncio, and England would voluntarily choose Rome within two years. As a French lady wrote at the end of his life:

  ‘Our good King James is a brave and honest man, but the silliest I have ever seen in my life; a child of seven would not make such crass mistakes as he does. Piety makes people outrageously stupid.’14

  There was one comfort for Tories like John Evelyn as the second anniversary of Charles II’s death came round. The King’s closet interviews with MPs appeared to have had little effect. There seemed no chance that he could persuade a Tory parliament to suspend the legislation which protected their church. That meant that if the King wanted to move beyond ad hoc dispensations for Catholics by prerogative power, he would have both to ignore Parliament and to abandon the party which had sustained him through the Exclusion Crisis. But that was unthinkable. The Tories were the loyal party, the party of the crown. James had only celebrated his Coronation Day thanks to their support. It seemed impossible that he could survive without them.