The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  Hence the astonishment, the absolute disbelief among Tories when the King issued a declaration in spring 1687 which announced that he would, indeed, abolish the Test Act by his own prerogative powers.

  ‘From henceforth the execution of all ... Penal Laws in matters ecclesiastical, for not coming to church, or not receiving the sacrament, or for any other non-conformity to the religion established, or for ... the exercise of religion in any manner whatsoever, [will] be immediately suspended.’

  By this declaration James alienated himself from all his natural supporters. He tore up the Restoration settlement. He initiated what few failed to see as a kind of revolution in England – a revolution to put in place an absolute monarchy on the French model, and to establish the Catholic Church. So great was the Rubicon James crossed when, on 5 April 1687, he issued his Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. The King had signalled his right to order affairs in England without recourse to Parliament. Tory control of worship in England was over.

  Perhaps most astonishing of all, the papist, arbitrary monarch had established what some radicals had been arguing for all along: toleration in matters of religion.

  XI

  ‘THE TRUE BOUNDS BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE COMMONWEALTH’

  Soon after the failure of Monmouth’s rebellion, John Locke went into hiding.

  James always saw the presence of the rebels in the United Provinces as a standing affront. ‘I ... must need tell you’, he wrote to the Prince of Orange (writing to his nephew and son-in-law, as always, de haut en bas),

  ‘that it does really seem strange to me that so many of the rebels should be connived at Amsterdam ... and permitted to live so publicly as they do ... This affair ... is of great concern to me ... Pray consider of this, and how important it is to me, to have those people destroyed.’1

  English agents spied on the Croom Elbow coffee house, and followed the exiles wherever they went. Robert Peyton, a former Exclusionist MP, was kidnapped and almost dragged to a waiting boat, but a crowd surrounded the spies and rescued him. Amsterdam’s support for the exiles was vital. An English spy in search of Robert Ferguson, ‘the grand criminal and head of all mischief’, spotted Slingsby Bethel in the Nieuwe Kerk and trailed him back to a house which he kept under observation until three in the morning. Without result; he reported back to Bevil Skelton, the English ambassador, that a Dutch magistrate had tipped Ferguson off. The same thing happened shortly afterwards when agents cornered Ferguson again. Skelton’s spy in the coffee house ‘had not been there about half an hour but the news was whispered amongst the English that ... the bird was flown’.2 Alerted by the Dutch, Ferguson had climbed out of a back window and escaped across the rooftops.

  Even if English agents could be avoided, exile had many other trials. Money was always short. Commercial ventures were put in hand but Skelton soon infiltrated them. ‘My Dearest,’ Thomas Papillon wrote to his wife, ‘take notice my letter per Mr Fentzell was seized; I suppose when they have perused it you may have it sent you.’3 The exiles had to resort to secret couriers, to cant language, to invisible ink.* They filled their correspondence with protestations about their lack of political activity. For a time, John Locke became ‘Dr van der Linden’.

  He found refuge in the house of Dr Veen. There Locke was comfortable enough, but lonely. His friend Philip van Limborch, a professor at the Remonstrant seminary on the Herengracht, visited often but found him depressed. ‘Solitude wearied him and he longed to breathe a freer air.’4 Published three years later, the tract John Locke composed in those months would be dedicated to his closest Dutch friend.

  Perhaps it was not surprising that the subject of that tract was toleration. Toleration was a shared concern of Locke and Limborch, whose Remonstrant sect was noted for its tolerant attitudes. Besides, it was the winter of 1685 and Amsterdam, like London, was full of Huguenot refugees. The whole of Europe was discussing the effects of intolerance in France.

  Toleration also developed the ideas Locke had set out in his second Treatise of Government. If that earlier work was, in part, a response to a world which seemed increasingly complex, his thoughts on toleration addressed a parallel question: how could religious settlement be found for a world which was no longer united in faith? Europe had experienced a gruesome century and a half of religious conflict. This was Locke’s solution.

  ‘It is not ... diversity of opinions, which cannot be avoided, but the refusal of toleration to people of diverse opinions ... that has produced most of the disputes and wars that have arisen in the Christian world.’5

  There could be no reassembly of Europe’s shattered religious unity, Locke asserted – neither by force, nor by persuasion. Unity of belief, the dream of both Catholic zealots and Anglican Tories, was a chimera. The world contained a plurality of faiths and it always would. The question was not how one faith could come to dominate others, but how conflict between faiths could be brought to an end.

  Toleration was Locke’s answer – toleration not just as a virtue, but as a necessity if men were to live in peace together. First, the state must withdraw entirely from matters of belief. ‘I regard it as necessary above all to distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between the church and the commonwealth.’ It should be disabled even from forbidding ‘speculative opinions’ (such as John Locke held); it should expect diversity in its own citizens. And between those citizens, secondly, there must also be toleration. ‘No private person ought in any way to attack or damage another person’s civil goods because he professes another religion or form of worship; all violence and injury must be avoided, whether he be Christian or Pagan.’6

  The revolutionary nature of these ideas on toleration, their sheer difficulty to contemporaries, cannot be underestimated. Apart from the United Provinces there was no secular state in Europe. In France, Louis had just used the state’s power violently to impose unity in the church. English Tories saw church and crown as interlinked (hence their problems with James). The separation of Commonwealth and Church left both feeling naked. Even Locke’s fellow-radicals found it hard, many of them, to see politics other than in religious terms. When Thomas Papillon attempted a definition of the two-party conflict in England, he described Whig and Tory entirely in terms of their faith.

  ‘Under the name of Tories is comprehended all those that cry up the Church of England ... [and] press the forms and ceremonies more than the doctrines of the church ... Under the name of Whigs is comprehended most of the sober and religious persons of the Church of England that sincerely embrace the doctrines of the church, and put no such stress on the forms and ceremonies ... as also all Dissenters.’7

  As for toleration between churches, that was no easier. There scarcely was a Church which did not aspire to universal dominance. Catholics still spoke of exterminating the ‘northern heresy’. English Presbyterians did not want to live in peace with Archbishop Sancroft; they wanted their principles accepted by the Church of England. Toleration seemed unnatural. It was against all religious instinct to see a neighbour in error, but shrug and let him continue in heresy. The tolerant society could not be found anywhere on earth – except, perhaps, in the bustling commercial city where John Locke sat talking with Philip van Limborch.

  There were limits to Locke’s toleration. He drew the line at Catholics, not because of what they believed, but because their loyalty to the Pope outlawed them as loyal citizens of the state. In general, however, toleration accorded with the political vision Locke had set out in the Two Treatises. Taken together, here was the full alternative to ‘popery and arbitrary government’: a political system based on the rule of law, which assumed diversity in its citizens. Popery and absolutism seemed of-a-piece; so did this vision of individuality and the limited state.

  What made no sense at all to Locke, when rumours of the English King’s Gracious Declaration to all his Loving Subjects for Liberty of Conscience began to circulate in the exiled community, was for
an absolutist monarch (as the exiles undoubtedly considered James) to promote toleration.

  ‘It is, and hath of long time been our constant sense and opinion ... that conscience ought not to be constrained ... in matters of mere religion.’

  Perhaps James truly believed that freedom of choice meant that everyone would choose Rome. If he expected his Declaration to be taken at face value, however, he was soon disappointed. Locke, the exiles and almost everyone in England assumed that this opening of the door to all – Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and Quakers – had more cynical motives: that it was a backdoor way of introducing Catholicism to England.

  XII

  ‘MATTERS OF MERE RELIGION’

  ‘We cannot but heartily wish ... that all the people of our Dominions were members of the Catholic Church, yet we humbly thank Almighty God that it is, and hath of long time been our constant sense and opinion ... that conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in matters of mere religion.’

  His Majesty’s Gracious Declaration to All His Loving Subjects for Liberty of Conscience, 4 April 1687

  Roger Morrice was a Dissenter living in the City of London. He was an unobtrusive, thoughtful man, barely remarked by his contemporaries, and yet he was unobtrusively well-connected, familiar with City politicians and lawyers, with leaders of the Dissenting churches, and with Low Church Anglican clerics – ‘English Protestants’ he called them as a group, by distinction from the ‘Hierarchist’ Tory bishops. Unobtrusively he made the rounds of London, from Guildhall to church, from lawyers’ offices to Westminster, and all the time, whether his acquaintance knew it or not, Roger Morrice was watching, listening and recording. If there was a debate in Parliament, Roger Morrice obtained an account of it. If there was a riot in the City he found an eyewitness. For Roger Morrice’s passion was news, and at home, in three large leather-bound ‘Entring Books’, he was compiling, week after week, a massive hand-written account of his own times.

  There was no news for years that matched the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. ‘It was the greatest post on Thursday night it’s thought that has been known’, wrote Morrice after an unobtrusive visit to the Post Office. ‘I heard myself a chief officer of the house say there had not been one so great these 20 years, nor consequently so much extraordinary postage, he said positively to me the extraordinary advance that night was 500£.’ Roger Morrice preferred fact to opinion – he was as quiet in the pages of his ‘Entring Books’ as he was in life – and yet he was an astute puzzler over politics, and James’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience had him puzzling for page after page about the King’s intentions. ‘None of my acquaintance can yet comprehend any reason great enough to bottom so great a revolution upon as this is’, he wrote.

  ‘To say their general design is to bring in Popery is to say nothing, for that is acknowledged, but the question is how these means can conduce to this, and that is to say, how giving liberty to Protestant Dissenters and letting them into the Government can answer this end?’1

  One thing which soon became clear was that Liberty of Conscience would precipitate a grand realignment in English politics. The Tories would never repeal the Test, and so James had intentionally abandoned them. The new coalition he hoped to construct in their place hardly seemed a promising one, however. The King appeared to believe that he could forge an alliance between Catholics and their sworn enemies on the far horizon of religion and politics, the extreme Protestant Dissenters. That meant an alliance with Stephen Towgood and John Whiting, with the men of the Good Old Cause – with the very people who had executed his father. James believed that Liberty of Conscience was a policy which could unite Catholic and ‘fanatic’ into a force strong enough to dominate English politics.

  For Tories, Liberty of Conscience was the final proof that their King had turned on them. All over the country they found themselves purged from corporations and driven from the bench of magistrates. Edmund Bohun entered into an argument with a Catholic priest at Whitehall and was struck off as a magistrate in Suffolk. If the Tory establishment would not vote him Liberty of Conscience, then James would create a new establishment to do as he asked. Sunderland and George Jeffreys headed the commission to oversee the quo warranto proceedings by which corporations were remodelled. More than 1,200 officeholders would be driven out over the next twelve months. Every post, Sir John Reresby wrote, ‘brought news of gentlemen’s losing their employments ... and Papists for the most part put in their rooms’.2 Either Papists or extreme Dissenters. ‘Was an Anabaptist very odd ignorant mechanick ... made Lord Mayor!’3 exclaimed John Evelyn. Ailesbury went to the Lord Mayor’s Show which installed the ‘ignorant mechanick’ that autumn, and

  ‘took notice to a Lord in my coach what sneaking faces most of the liverymen of the Companies had, that lined the streets. “Can you wonder at it?” said that Lord. “All the jolly, genteel citizens are turned out, and all sneaking fanatics put into their places!”’4

  Never in their worst nightmares had Tories imagined this. In the sheerest disbelief Roger and Dudley North opened the Gazette twice a week to read loyal messages of thanks from groups whose very existence had recently been illegal – from Quakers and Catholics, from the Presbyterians of Maidstone and the Congregationalists of Hitching and Hartford, ‘subscribed by a great number of most considerable Anabaptists in and about London’.5

  The Tories’ first instinct, of course, was to warn Dissenters against taking the King’s apparent generosity at face value. ‘The other day you were Sons of Belial, Now you are Angels of Light’, wrote the discarded Marquess of Halifax, ‘the Trimmer’, in an open Letter to a Dissenter. ‘This is a violent change, and it will be fit for you to pause upon it, before you believe it.’6 The trouble was that many non-conformists, Roger Morrice among them, thought Dissenters in the Government would make England safer from Rome – it was the crypto-Catholic Hierarchists who could not be trusted. Besides, bitterness between Dissenters and the Hierarchists was a long-running sore, and the sickly smile with which Anglicans now preached Protestant unity at their former victims was distinctly hard to stomach. To many Dissenters, indeed, the greatest benefit of James’s declaration was the confusion of their old persecutors. ‘A breaking wheel began to pass over the enemies of the people of God,’ Stephen Towgood wrote in his Book of Remembrance as he read of Tories ejected from their posts,

  ‘and it might well be said by all wise observers, Come behold the works of the Lord ... He setteth up one and putteth down another.’7

  The support of Dissenters was crucial to James’s hopes of making his new coalition work. That support often seemed equivocal, however, in the months after James issued his declaration. Few trusted the King’s motives.

  ‘REMOTI [wrote Roger Morrice]. It is very probable that the Court will very suddenly change their scene, and displace those sober Dissenters they have lately put into the City and put in their steads servants and dependants of the King’s.’8

  The fear that Liberty of Conscience was a trap predominated in the exiled community, whither James despatched William Penn, the wealthy Quaker who had just founded the colony of Pennsylvania, as his roving ambassador for Liberty of Conscience. Penn reached Amsterdam bearing bribes in the form of pardons for many of James’s former enemies (so extraordinary was this revolution in English politics) but encountered much hostility. ‘A trick’ was the response of Robert Ferguson, Monmouth’s former chaplain.

  ‘To serve a present juncture of affairs ... When the Court and Jesuitic end is ... obtained ... instead of their hearing any longer of Liberty and Toleration, they [will] be told ... that all must be members of the Catholic Church.’9

  Beyond these darker fears was a widespread distrust of the ‘arbitrary’ means James had used to establish his toleration. The Quaker John Whiting, freed from jail in Ilchester, welcomed the chance to worship as he pleased, but thought ‘it did not come forth in the way we could have wished for, viz. by King and Parliament, which would h
ave been more acceptable than the granting of it by virtue of the prerogative’.10 John Locke had moved to Rotterdam by the time Liberty of Conscience was declared, and was living with a Quaker merchant, Benjamin Furly, and his five children on the Scheepmakers Haven. It was in Furly’s house that he received confirmation from his friend James Tyrrell of the extraordinary developments in England. ‘More are displeased at the manner of doing it,’ Tyrrell wrote, ‘than at the thing itself.’11 It was the manner by which James had declared toleration, however, which made many radicals so supicious. Toleration could not be compatible with arbitrary government. Sooner or later James’s instincts would reassert themselves.

  Sceptics could soon claim vindication of their warnings. For Liberty of Conscience was not the only political development in England that spring and summer. And every other report appeared to reinforce suspicion that James would set no limits to the abuse of arbitrary power.

  Isaac Newton was a little-known professor at Cambridge University. Reclusive, neurotic and unkempt, he was a mystery to his fellows at Trinity College, who knew only that he rarely left his rooms and that he was a genius. They were all the more surprised, therefore, when, in March 1687, he suddenly involved himself in university politics. The reason was an attack by the King on the university’s independence. James had ordered Cambridge to admit Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, without taking the Test. Newton spoke vociferously against giving in to the King, and when James summoned the vice-chancellor to appear before the Ecclesiastical Commission, he was one of the delegation appointed to support him. Three times the University delegation appeared before the Commission, presided over by the terrifying figure of George Jeffreys. History does not, perhaps fortunately, relate what Jeffreys thought of Isaac Newton. Newton was instrumental, however, in holding the University line against any compromise. Alban Francis was refused his degree.