‘We were filled with golden dreams’, wrote one radical a few years after the Revolution. ‘But tho we have dreamed the dream yet we have not seen the visions.’35 Many compromised, as Nottingham had compromised on the Tory side. John Locke was preparing his Two Treatises of Government for Awnsham Churchill’s presses as the politicians sat at their coronation feast. They would be published anonymously – Locke would never lose his fear of persecution – and too late to have any influence on events, but, for all his disappointment at the Convention, Locke could still find enough radical heart in it to associate his tract with the new order. The old King’s offences had been recorded, after all; the people (or at least the Convention) could be said to have decided the throne; something very like a contract was read out before it was offered. The aim of publishing the Two Treatises, Locke said, was
‘to establish the Throne of our Great Restorer, Our present King William; to make good his Title, in the Consent of the People, which being the only one of all lawful Governments, he has more fully and clearly than any other Prince in Christendom.’36
It was not saying much, perhaps, that William had the people’s consent more fully than Louis XIV. Nonetheless Locke took office under the new régime, as would many others, John Wildman and Thomas Papillon among them. For others, though, the disenchantment of 1689 was too bitter to swallow. Robert Ferguson, hook-nosed veteran of the Exclusion Crisis, of Monmouth’s rebellion and the Dutch exile, would cross the entire political spectrum in his fury. By the winter of 1689 he would be plotting in Scotland against the new monarchs, and soon would have turned full circle to join the Jacobites, penning tracts as furiously as ever for his former enemy. Perhaps Edmund Bohun was right that Commonwealthmen of Ferguson’s stamp really only wanted chaos from which a new republic might emerge.
The truth was that no ideology survived the Revolution intact. At the time of the Exclusion Crisis, Tories had predicted a monarchical, Anglican nation in which loyal subjects lived in obedience to sovereign and church, while Radicals looked forward to a world where rights and powers were clearly apportioned, and everyone lived in harmony with them. But even as both parties (and the many, of course, who espoused neither whole-heartedly) joined in William and Mary’s Coronation banquet, it was clear that what would actually emerge was something quite different.
‘A curtail’d mungril monarchy, half commonwealth’,37 Dryden called it. The new political world would be a place of alternatives and choices. There were even alternatives to explain why William was King. Everyone in England and Scotland could decide for themselves whether to accept William as King de facto or de jure, whether he had processed up Westminster Abbey through divine providence, through election by the people, inheritance after the King’s abdication, or by conquest – Edmund Bohun’s preferred option.* ‘Men will submit to the government upon their own particular principles’,38 wrote one radical. No longer was the authority of Kings fixed; it seemed to be a matter of personal choice.
So too was the individual that each Englishman chose to call his King. That was an even starker choice. Hardly a senior politician in Westminster, Whig or Tory, failed to make contact with the exiled King James at some point in the next few years. The Jacobite alternative would endure for the next seven decades as a perpetual opposition, a road not taken. Burnet reported how some even sensed a principle of competitive government in this:
‘They thought it would be a good security for the nation to have a dormant title to the crown lie as it were neglected, to oblige our princes to govern well, while they would apprehend the danger of a revolt to a pretender still in their eye.’39*
As for the politicians in Westminster Hall, they presented an even greater range of choices. When they emerged during the Exclusion Crisis, Whig and Tory assumed they were engaged in a battle to the death, a battle to establish once for all time the principles by which England would be governed. Now they found themselves sharing tables in Westminster. They competed for the King’s eye, for patronage, for power. It was warfare not to the death, but permanent and ongoing, bitterly divisive.
‘[The] most violent party heat ... appeared upon all occasions, and ... the parties of Whig and Tory appeared almost in every debate, and in every question.’40
These were not modern parties, of course. They had neither formal existence, nor organisational structure. They did not alternate in Government, or present coherent platforms to the electorate. England was a monarchy; no politician wielded anything like the power of the King, and it was the King, not the people, to whom the politicians answered and who provided the umbrella under which they fought.* Nevertheless, parties did offer, if not opposing legislative programmes, then at least opposing badges of identity. The political mindsets of Whig and Tory were shorthand for different perspective and loyalties, different visions of what the country was, how its past should be explained, and what it should hope for in future, and they did offer alternative ideologies. In the past their differences had been enough to bring the nation to war. After the Revolution, they would co-exist – to everyone’s surprise – in a state of permanent, dynamic equilibrium, a controlled chemical reaction.
That reaction might have fizzled out if Parliament could have been sidelined – as all of England’s recent Kings had attempted to sideline it. But William needed Parliament. He faced a life or death struggle with the greatest power in Europe, a struggle he could not win without English money and English troops. For them he needed regular parliaments, and therefore political parties.
The logical extension of this was the need for elections – and through them a wider world beyond Westminster would win some kind of place in the Revolution settlement. ‘Public opinion’, ‘the people’, ‘the mob’, had been important enough in the struggles of the past fifty years. All sides had both feared the public and tried to harness their support. Now, not only did the Revolution couple ‘the people’ with the disposal of power (however vaguely); the twelve elections that would turn the 1690s into a permanent political battleground drew them decisively into the fray. The Revolution settlement may not have introduced democracy, but it did require consent. And while the electorate was, for its time, large enough – larger, perhaps, than it would be again until the Great Reform Act of 1832 – still more who could not vote were drawn to the passionate theatre of the hustings. Some predicted that frequent elections ‘would make the freeholders proud and insolent, when they knew that applications would be made to them at the end of three years’.41 As the politicians toasted their new King and Queen, all were aware of the unruly new power which lay beyond the doors of Westminster Hall.
No one foresaw any of this before the Glorious Revolution. No tract written before 1688 advocated anything like the system which emerged after it. Whatever outcome had been predicted by Whig or Tory, it was not this: politics based neither on the principles of Algernon Sidney, nor those of Robert Filmer, but on mutating, competing parties, power limited, interests at war. A schism in the monarchy, simultaneous alternatives of ideology, a free market in theories about what had brought this small, ugly Dutchman to the centre of the high table – this was what Westminster now contained. It could not have been further from the simple vision of power and authority which Louis XIV had developed in France. If it recalled anything, it was the impenetrable constitution of the United Provinces. This was the new political world, factious, unsettling, ill-defined, into which the Revolution had hurled England. It was a world which none of the Convention members sitting at the Coronation banquet had foreseen or ever experienced.
That was enough in itself to introduce an undercurrent of apprehension into the Hall – that and Ireland, and the mutterings of a malcontent nation beyond the doors. But there was more. A vital part of the settlement had barely yet been addressed. For politics was only one of the issues which so recently brought the country to war. It was religion which tore James’s reign apart. And as the politicians enjoyed their feast, the search for a religious settlement had hardly begun
.
IV
‘EQUAL LIBERTY FOR ALL’
‘Nothing could be more conducive to turning the world into a theatre of confusion and bloody slaughter than to accept it as a principle that all those who are convinced of the truth of their religion have the right to exterminate all other religions.’1
Pierre Bayle, 1683
Jaques and Anne Elisabeth Fontaine had first-hand experience of the Test Act.
When they first arrived in England in December 1685 they applied for aid from the collection for Huguenot refugees. £30 per annum was their share, and they received the first quarter’s allowance. Jaques was then told, however, ‘that before I could receive the next quarter, I must receive communion in the Church of England and send a certificate therof to the committee’.2 He was troubled by that – not because he refused Anglican communion, but because it reminded him of France. ‘I thought that this was quite like the Papist approach: “Come to mass and you shall be exempt from dragoons and taken care of like us.”’ More bigotry lay ahead. Jaques went up to London to lobby various clerics and spent hours in anterooms not even being offered a seat. One servant obviously thought he was going to steal the silver. ‘A black coat’, Jaques remembered, ‘without a long robe were sufficient indications to arouse their contempt.’ The committee which eventually interviewed him suggested he send Anne Elisabeth into service and offered him only £3 in relief.
For Dissenters, persecution had been the regular experience of the past quarter century. John Whiting, the Quaker who had shared his jail with the Monmouth prisoners, had watched the Meeting House at Bristol torn down in 1681, ‘forms, benches, glass-windows, ... galleries ... burnt or carried away’3 by soldiers, and the landlady’s furniture hurled to the Meeting House floor. At the Restoration the Anglican Church had established a monopoly of faith and walled it about with legislation, the so-called Clarendon Code, which excluded all nonconformists from society. The Test Act was the gateway to the citadel. Henry Purcell took it on 4 February 1683 in St Margaret’s Westminster:
‘Mr Henry Pursal ... after divine service and sermon, did in the parish church aforesaid receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the usage of the Church of England.’4
He needed that certificate just to take up an appointment among the King’s musicians. Those who refused the Test remained beyond the pale. The botanist John Ray had given up his living because he couldn’t subscribe to all the articles, and retired to poverty at Black Notley.
Ever since the Reformation had splintered the European church a century and a half before, religious possibilities had been multiplying. The Clarendon Code was an attempt to reimpose unity by force; to stamp out choice; to insist that the nation could share one church and one faith. Hence the fury with which high Anglicans – the ‘Hierarchists’, Roger Morrice called them – had greeted James’s dismantling of the Code in 1687. It was not only because they would lose power in the land. Toleration opened the doors to a plural society. And that was a paradox no easier to swallow in religion than in politics. How could alternatives co-exist? ‘A toleration of religion’, wrote the Tory propagandist Roger L’Estrange, ‘is cousin-german to a license for rebellion.’5 Unless there was unity there could only be chaos.
William turned to religion as soon as he was proclaimed. There was no avoiding it. Religion had precipitated the Revolution, and William had, besides, a debt to pay to the Dissenters who had manned his armies and secured London for him, and then cheered with the greatest enthusiasm when he and Mary were finally proclaimed. Other than a desire to establish peace, it is fair to say that William had no personal interest in Britain’s religious disputes. He may even have hoped that peace would break out spontaneously. Henry Compton, for one, had a reputation for tolerance. When he first greeted William in London he included in his retinue four Dissenting ministers, courteously drawing them to the Prince’s attention as ‘their brethren who differed from them in some minute matters but nothing substantial’.6 Back in the summer of 1688, even Archbishop Sancroft had written emollient articles urging his clergy to ‘visit [Dissenters] at their houses, and receive them kindly at their own, and treat them fairly wherever they meet them, discoursing calmly and civilly with them’. ‘They also walk in wisdom ... that are not of our communion’, the Archbishop had concluded sagely, but that was when he needed their support against James’s Liberty of Conscience, and few Dissenters had believed him. Roger Morrice could well remember what had been said before the Restoration, when Dissenters had been given ‘the most ample assurance that could well be expressed, that there should be no vengeance taken upon them for any past proceedings ... [and then] the Prelatists, contrary to all their solemn engagements and promises, did fall upon them like tigers’. Mutual suspicions were as entrenched in English religion as they were in English politics. Roger North had no doubt that every Dissenter was a rebel, while Roger Morrice had feared from the first that the Tories’ interest in James’s departure was to return the church to ‘a little narrow rotten foundation like that laid after the Restoration anno 1662’.7 Somehow, from these ingredients of mutual incomprehension and hatred, a religious settlement had to be concocted.
William’s first steps into this marsh showed quite how perilous his journey would be. He suggested abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the Church howled outrage. He bowed to Scottish pressure that the Presbyterian church should be established in Scotland, and Tories reacted furiously. Compromise seemed impossible. Three days after the coronation Sir John Reresby heard Halifax inveighing both against Dissenters who expected the earth, and the Church party ‘[who] had rather turn Papist than take in the Presbyterians among them ... In fine the Marquis said his [William’s] Government would be very short-lived at this rate.’8
And yet something had to be done. On 12 March John Locke wrote to Philip van Limborch to tell him that toleration was being debated in Parliament. Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia would be translated into English that summer and published anonymously in October. To Locke the solution to religious bigotry was still clear. Religion must be removed from public affairs, and toleration accepted as a principle by every church.
‘If a Papist believes that what another man calls bread is really the body of Christ, he does no injury to his neighbour. If a Jew does not believe the New Testament to be the word of God, he does not alter any civil rights ... Neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew should be excluded from the commonwealth because of his religion.’9
Locke’s letters on the issue of toleration made gloomy reading: slow progress or no progress, and endless foot-dragging by the Church’s political allies. The original aim was to pass two Bills. Comprehension would lift the Church’s skirts and allow the nearest Dissenters to scurry under her shelter. For those recalcitrants who insisted on staying out in the cold, meanwhile – Anabaptists, Independents, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists and the rest – there would then be a Toleration Bill to allow a minimal level of indulgence to all. But the scope of this Toleration seemed to get narrower and narrower, and no one could agree on how far to extend Comprehension, which, Roger Morrice reported, ‘is very narrow and stingy and will take in none’.10 Nor was Comprehension the way to establish peace in any case, in Locke’s opinion. The aim should not be to entrench one central church, however diffuse. Men would always quarrel about religion. There could be no peace without ‘equal liberty for all’.11
Locke, however, did not have to deal with English political realities; Nottingham, William’s Secretary of State, did. A High Churchman, Daniel Finch had distinguished himself from Tories like Clarendon by his willingness to work with the new régime. When Comprehension stuck in the Commons on a ploy by Tories (plotting, appropriately enough, in the Devil’s Tavern) to have the Bill referred to the Church of England’s own parliament, Nottingham told the King he could expect no better. William agreed, and the Comprehension Bill was buried.
The Toleration Act was all that remained of Dissenters’ dreams. Its full t
itle, An Act for Exempting their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects Dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalities of Certain Laws, was more accurate. It did not provide toleration at all, merely a grudging relaxation of certain restrictions for certain people. There would be worship by licence for moderate nonconformists – but only for those who believed in the Trinity and who accepted all but three of the thirty-nine articles. The rest would remain beyond the pale.
On paper it was a depressing outcome, but John Locke sounded surprisingly upbeat when he wrote to Limborch about it. ‘Not perhaps so wide in scope as might be wished for ... Still, it is something to have progressed so far.’12 Perhaps Locke was bearing in mind what Limborch had told him about the new King’s personal open-mindedness. William’s army was a testament to that, with its kaleidoscope of Catholics and Protestants of all varieties, the Jews who supplied it, and his exotic Jewish banker, Baron Francisco Lopes Suasso. Locke was not alone in applauding the Toleration Act, however. ‘O what a mercy it is,’ wrote Stephen Towgood in Axminster, ‘when Kings are nursing fathers and Queens nursing mothers to the churches of Christ.’13 He certainly saw the Act as the beginning of ‘rest and peace’. Indeed, its practical effect was greater than its grudging clauses suggested. Almost a thousand Dissenting meeting houses would be licensed immediately, nearly four thousand over the next two decades. Perhaps men like Locke realised that a small chink in the church’s defences was enough to establish the principle that its monopoly was broken. That was certainly the reaction of Anglican clerics, who could no longer enforce Sunday attendance at churches up and down the country. In Ipswich, Humphrey Prideaux heard his missing parishioners claim they were at Dissenting worship, but most of them, he thought, ended up in the alehouse. Henry Compton heard Londoners pleading Dissenting worship, but as often as not, he too thought they ‘have forsaken the church not to go to a meeting; but either to the ale-house or to loiter in the fields, or to stay at home, and that sometimes to follow worldly business’.14 Worshippers picked their way freely through the ruins of the Clarendon Code. Many Presbyterians could manage occasional worship at an Anglican church without too much damage to their consciences. One Lord Mayor prayed at the Anglican Church in the morning and his Meeting House in the afternoon. That practice of ‘Occasional Conformity’ unlocked the Test Act and opened the doors to participation in public affairs. The dream of one faith in England was over.
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