The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  Victories were publicised. Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs were reduced to three days; the landlord of the Horseshoe Tavern in Drury Lane announced that he would no longer serve drink on the Sabbath. When two of his former customers took their business elsewhere, God’s retribution was swift: one drank himself to death. Dunton trumpeted aloud the triumph of Tower Hamlets over ‘those naughty houses which formerly abounded amongst them’,15 and asked readers to write in with their own stories of the New Reformation. One such contributor was the Night Rambler of London, saviour of the capital’s tarts:

  ‘I fixed my eyes upon her and said – “Madam, methinks I read some lines and characters of goodness in your face which are not yet absolutely defaced ... Pray be free, and tell me, Are you yet proof against the lashes of your conscience?”’16

  If the crusaders did not want for fervour, neither did they lack targets. One by one they set their sights on all the most obvious features of the new town. From prostitution the Tower Hamlets reformers moved on to ‘put down several musick-houses which had degenerated into notorious nurseries of lewdness and debauchery’. (‘Some of both sexes’, they claimed rather implausibly, ‘had shamelessly danced naked in these licentious brothels.’)17 There were furious attacks on the London playhouses, ‘those two famous academies of hell ... where Satan ... keeps his headquarters’.18 Gambling, luxury, servants who dressed above their station – all would be targets of reform in the next thirty years. And the call was not only taken up by religious fanatics. John Locke supported reform. Thomas Papillon thought ‘there is no such way to preserve this kingdom against the common enemy, to wit France and Rome, as that the Government do effectually take care to suppress all Sabbath profanation, and all drunkenness, swearing, and debauchery’.19 Thinking men and women from both sides of the religious and political divide felt scared by the changes taking place in society, and supportive of those who moved to control them.

  So the great Reformation of Manners began. War set the campaign back, and for a few years there would be a lull. With peace, however, reformers would return to their task with renewed determination to complete the salvation of England.

  Early in 1696, James II set out from St Germain for his last attempt on England. His ragged courtiers flooded out into the streets to see him depart.

  ‘This cloth of state is laid for Royal James

  To walk upon towards his silver Thames.

  The leaves peep out, to see the King go by,

  Whilst birds huzza him with their warbling cry,

  And little insects hum, Vivez le Roy!’20

  Near Calais a French army was already assembling; across the Channel, Sir John Fenwick had laid plans for a Jacobite uprising. Fenwick was a good-natured man, in Ailesbury’s opinion, but ‘his headpiece not of the best’. At Calais the French army remained, waiting for the uprising to begin, while in London the Jacobites waited for the French to land. Ailesbury listened to them at Mrs Mountjoy’s tavern in St James’s, happily deciding who would hold which ministry after the restoration. ‘“Gentlemen,”’ he told them in exasperation, ‘“there is an old proverb – take the bear and then divide the skin.”’ For Ailesbury, here were more of the old Jacobite ‘indiscretions, chimeras, and noise, and nonsense’.21 Louis had heard enough Jacobite promises. He would not believe that England wanted James back until he saw open rebellion. For their part, the English Jacobites would not risk death until French aid was at hand. They could have gone on waiting forever.

  Stalemate was eventually broken by just one of those ‘chimeras’ Jacobites were never disciplined enough to avoid. A separate Jacobite group hatched a plot to assassinate William. Ever more withdrawn after Mary’s death, even more desperate for solitude, the King had developed a habit of crossing the Thames at Brentford Ferry by himself, when he came back from hunting in Richmond, and riding on alone until his bodyguard caught up. The assassins planned to wait for him just beyond the ferry. One of the gang was caught, however, and in the resulting arrests Fenwick’s group was also rounded up. Sir John was beheaded on Tower Hill with a non-juring clergyman, Jeremy Collier, to hear his confession. William, meanwhile, used the outrage surrounding the assassination plot with great skill. Few liked William but a hard stare at the alternatives did much to focus minds – and there were plenty of guilty consciences in Westminster. Shrewsbury was implicated by Fenwick for having made contact with St Germain; he later resigned. Other politicians hurried to sign an Association of loyalty to the King.

  The army at Calais marched away; James returned to St Germain. He denied all knowledge of the assassination plot, but the taint of murder did him no good with the English. Nor did it help his relations with Louis, who saw the latest débâcle not only as proof of Jacobite amateurism, but as a stain on his honour. The Sun King would do nothing more to return James II to his throne. In any case it was time for that confusing and inconclusive conflict known variously as the War of the League of Augsburg, the Nine Years’ War and King William’s War to come to an end. If England was on the brink of financial disaster, Louis was suffering even worse. The war had devastated the French economy, and damaged the prestige of a King who lived and breathed prestige; its one unmistakable lesson was that the Universal Monarch could be checked. Louis XIV needed peace even more desperately than his rival, and peace, both knew, meant acceptance of the Revolution in London. ‘[The King] does not care to enter into business with us’,22 Mary of Modena noted anxiously after a visit to Versailles. At Ryswick on 20 September 1697 France signed peace with England, Holland and Spain (peace with the Empire would be signed at the end of October), and William III was recognised by France – only de facto, Louis assured his cousin, who was allowed to remain at St Germain, but both knew that James, sixty-seven years old now, would never return to London. The threat to the Revolution was over.

  And so England returned to peace, and with peace came another chance to turn back the clock on the destructive changes the Revolution had brought in its wake.

  Colley Cibber’s career resolutely failed to take off. He had looked forward to love scenes with Anne Bracegirdle, but the call never came. The success of shows like The Fairy Queen was one problem; another was that he was small and odd-looking with a high-pitched voice. When Betterton took his stars off to form a new company, Colley Cibber was forced to sit humiliatingly in the wings. In the end he came up with a novel answer: he would write a play for himself to star in. Love’s Last Shift, subtitled The Fool in Fashion, was put on by Rich at Drury Lane in January 1696 (just before Delarivier Manley’s first play). Love’s Last Shift was only a moderate success, but Cibber’s star turn as ‘Sir Novelty Fashion’ was a triumph. More importantly, it caught the imagination of a writer far greater than Cibber, who could not resist writing Sir Novelty into a sequel.

  On 22 November 1692, the day Purcell’s Hail, Bright Cecilia! was first heard at Stationer’s Hall, the gates of the Bastille opened to release an English army officer who had been held captive in France for four years in a diplomatic stand-off. As it happened, he had shared his imprisonment with Montague North, Roger and Dudley’s brother, and the release of both men was arranged by the Earl of Ailesbury, who might have crossed paths with them on his visit to St Germain in March 1693. That was when the captives finally returned to England after six months of French bureaucracy. For one of them, at least, the time was not wasted. John Vanbrugh’s head came back filled with French architecture, and his trunk with the first draft of a comedy. That comedy, The Provok’d Wife, would be put on hold when Vanbrugh saw Sir Novelty Fashion. He took only six weeks to write a sequel to Love’s Last Shift and Rich snapped it up immediately. On 21 November 1696, The Relapse was premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

  The evening was famously chaotic. George Powell, playing Worthy, was a notorious lush, and had spent the day ‘drinking his mistress’s health in Nants brandy, from six in the morning to the time he waddled on stage in the evening’. When he reached his seduction scene with Amanda, playe
d by the beguiling Mrs Rogers, as Vanbrugh recalled, ‘[he] had toasted himself up to such a pitch of vigour I confess I once gave Amanda for gone’.23 Colley Cibber, though, was once again a triumph. It cannot be easy to have your play upstaged by someone else’s sequel, but Cibber was too much the professional not to bow to Vanbrugh’s easy style, ‘his wit and humour ... so little laboured that his most entertaining scenes seemed to be no more than his common conversation committed to paper’.24 He quoted in his theatrical reminiscences Congreve’s damning put down of Love’s Last Shift, that it ‘had only in it a great many things that were like wit, that in reality were not wit’,25 and added a true actor’s compliment to Vanbrugh: ‘There is something so catching to the ear, so easy to the memory in all he writ, that it has been observ’d by all the actors of my time, that the style of no author whatsoever, gave their memory less trouble than that of Sir John Vanbrugh.’ Sir Novelty Fashion had been ennobled by Vanbrugh to become Lord Foppington. Teetering across the stage with pockets down to his knees and a periwig so large it had to be carried on in its own sedan-chair, he was a monstrous symbol of the new town, victim of each passing trend, the peacock embodiment of the new age.

  Vanbrugh knew his tale of deceit and lust would cause anger. Vanity and luxury, cynical marriages and uppity servants, contempt for the country, materialism, social climbing and fashion – they were all there in The Relapse. He pictured the typical critic as a Puritan ‘with flat plod shoes, a little band, greasy hair and a dirty face’.26 What he got was cleaner and considerably more dangerous. Jeremy Collier was the High Churchman who had stood on the scaffold with John Fenwick. Now he turned his furious energies towards a target reformers had long had in their sights, The Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. ‘Goats and monkeys’, Collier stormed, ‘if they could speak would express their brutality in such language as this.’ He had nothing but contempt for Vanbrugh’s easy wit. The London theatre, Collier claimed, celebrated everything in the new town it should have condemned, awakening folly, weakening the defences of virtue, ‘staining’ the imagination. It ‘degrade[s] humane nature,’ he wrote, ‘and breaks down the distinctions between man and beast’.27

  Reformation was needed more than ever, for the years since 1688 had seen the growth of both dangerous ideas and dangerous manners. England had not heeded the reformers’ call. It had sunk ever further into depravity. Collier’s publication caught the mood of the moment so well that he even escaped punishment for his connection with Fenwick. The war was over and England had to pay for God’s support. 1698 saw a dramatic resurgence for the Societies for Reformation of Manners, whose numbers swelled to forty in London (on Josiah Woodward’s count), with clones springing up in the provinces. The Societies’ campaigns would grow until at their height, in 1722, more than 7,000 sinners were dragged through the courts. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was founded by Thomas Bray in 1699. Spiritual rebirth was noted even in the depths of Kent ‘[where] to the joy of all pious souls,’ Josiah Woodward gasped, ‘our shepherds, ploughmen and other labourers at their work perfume the air with the melodious singing of psalms’.28

  The King also chose this moment to relaunch his vision of the virtuous state. ‘I esteem it one of the great advantages of the peace,’ William told Parliament that December, ‘that I shall now have leisure to rectify such corruptions or abuses as may have crept into any part of the administration during the war, and effectually to discourage profaneness and immorality.’29 The Revolution’s virtuous image had been badly dented by the war. William was thinking in particular of the City financiers who had become so unpopular, the Tom Doubles who had made fortunes for themselves and burdened the nation with war debt at the unimaginable level of £17.5m. Never before had England’s expenditure risen to such heights – over £5m a year in 1695. No wonder writers like Charles Davenant campaigned for change. There must be no more borrowing, they asserted. There must be no more credit and no more funds, no more armies they could not afford. The nation must be extricated from the world of financial shadows into which it had disappeared.

  The debate about England’s armed forces would occupy much of the next three years. The standing army debate was not only about money and debt, however. It was also about the kind of nation England had become. Standing armies in England were a shorthand for tyranny – that was why James’s troops on Hounslow Heath had excited so much fear in 1686. Now arbitrary government had been defeated, but William proposed to keep his military resource. The Revolution had begun with property flying on its banners but it had confiscated property through taxation at unprecedented levels. Whatever anyone expected in 1688, it was certainly not a state more rather than less powerful than the old one. For contract theorists like John Locke, the state was supposed to be minimal. Free citizens should live their lives in private, ceding to central authority just so much power as was necessary to preserve their property. By contrast, the revolutionary regime, bloated by war, had grown every year, with new places, new committees, an expanding bureaucracy. King and Parliament, Whig and Tory; individually their power may have been checked by the cumbrous political dance they began in 1689; collectively the state appeared to be growing year after year.

  This was a new monster for idealists to slay. ‘Tho’ the nation is by this time sadly sensible how wretchedly they have fallen short of their expected happiness,’ wrote John Toland in The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments, ‘yet are they not all acquainted with the true spring and fountain from whence all their misfortunes flow ... bare-fac’d and openly-avow’d corruption.’ Toland thought the Revolution had replaced absolutism with a bloated political monster which was now devouring its own principles. The classical tradition of English republicans, the tradition of the political philosopher James Harrington, had fantasised about selfless philosophers in a Roman Senate. St Stephen’s Chapel now presented the far less appetising spectacle of Government MPs

  ‘always kept together in a close and undivided phalanx, impenetrable either by shame or honour, voting always the same way and saying always the same things, as if they were no longer voluntary agents, but so many engines merely turned about by a mechanical motion.’30

  Anger drove some disappointed idealists to return to the principle of a disinterested and moral ‘Country’ politics in opposition to the corrupt ‘Court’. The first stirrings of this revival had been seen in the winter of 1691, when a group of renegade Whigs led by Robert Harley and Paul Foley pushed successfully for a Commission of Accounts to scrutinise Government expenditure. Over the following sessions, Country measures became annual tests of strength: Place Bills to exclude placemen from the Commons, Triennial Bills which guaranteed regular elections at no more than three-year intervals. The Grecian Coffee House in Devereux Court became home to these Whig malcontents. The state exaggerated the Jacobite security threat, they argued, to justify spending on defence (‘What is this but making the old abdicated tyrant a footstool to ascend the throne of absolute power?’). And the House of Commons – ‘their eyes blinded with the dust of gold and their tongues locked up with silver keys’31 – did nothing to stop them.

  Whig malcontents found themselves sharing the ‘Country’ ideal with Tories for whom the country was, in many ways, an easier destination to reach. The landed gentry suffered in the 1690s, first from the land tax, then from the agricultural depression which pushed Edmund Bohun a little further into poverty. His tenant at Dale Hall failed owing him £300 – enough for Edmund Bohun and his family to live on for a year – so he abandoned his house in London and resolved to farm himself, a pursuit for which he already knew he had no aptitude, and at which he proved wretchedly unsuccessful, ‘so that I lived a life truly full of misery, poverty and disquiet’. In August 1696, hit ‘by the badness of the money, which had reduced me to insuperable wants’,32 he was finally forced to abandon his estate and move into Ipswich. This was the landed Gentleman’s nightmare: to slip out of his class into one of the faceless crevices of society. And while Gent
lemen struggled, they were forced to watch others, Tom Doubles, rise up by propulsive means they barely understood. ‘We have been fighting’, the satirist Jonathan Swift would write bitterly of the next French war, ‘to enrich usurers and stock-jobbers, and to cultivate the pernicious designs of a faction by destroying the landed interest.’33 There was a central paradox in the new politics which many simply could not accept. Like modern fashion or modern trade, the new competitive politics seemed to feed not on good sense but on its opposites: greed and the lust for power.

  It was hardly surprising that some fled into Jacobitism. There, at least, lay simple certainty. At St Germain all compromises and complications disappeared; there remained only the loyalty which Ailesbury proudly remembered as the guiding star of his own life: ‘I sucked it in with my milk, and will continue the same to my last moment.’34 Others fought back. Under the ‘Country’ banner, moral Whig joined forces with alienated Tory.* In 1691 a Triennial Bill was headed off only by a dissolution. Two years later another attempt passed both houses, precipitating a political crisis when William refused to sign it. By the end of that year, though, the King needed to bring the Whigs into the Ministry, and Whigs like Shrewsbury favoured a Triennial Act for traditional Whig reasons: that it would prevent a monarch evading elections. That, William must have decided, was a price worth paying. On 22 December 1694 – two days after Mary fell ill – the Triennial Act became law.

  This was the start of the return to virtue, Country politicians hoped. The Triennial Act would usher in ‘a golden age’

  ‘wherein the character men were in, and reputation they had, would be the prevailing considerations in elections: and by this means it was hoped, that our constitution, in particular that part of it which related to the House of Commons, would again recover both its strength and reputation.’35