The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Charles took his time—fifteen years—about announcing his conversion. His brother openly proclaimed himself a Catholic in 1671; but even the pro-Catholic Earl of Arlington warned the King that a similar admission might precipitate a revolution. Charles, however, moved toward his goal by issuing (March 15, 1672) his second “Declaration of Indulgence for Tender Consciences,” suspending “all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical, against whatsoever sort of Nonconformists or recusants.” At the same time he released from prison all persons who had been jailed for not conforming to the religious legislation of Parliament. Hundreds of Dissenters, including Bunyan and many Quakers, were freed, and their leaders sent a deputation to thank the King. Presbyterians and Puritans were shocked to find that the new freedom accorded to them was extended also to Catholics and Anabaptists, and Anglicans were horrified by “papists and swarms of sectaries” meeting openly in London. For almost a year England enjoyed or suffered religious toleration.

  On March 17, 1672, England opened the Third Dutch War. In this matter King and Parliament were now agreed. The Parliament voted £ 1,250,000 for the war, but this sum was to be doled out to the government in installments that would obviously depend upon the King’s reconciliation with Parliament and its religious legislation. The Commons declared that “penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by Act of Parliament”; and it sent a petition to the King that his Declaration of Indulgence should be withdrawn. Louis XIV, anxious to have England give united support to the war against the Dutch, advised Charles to cancel the Declaration until the war should be successfully concluded. Charles yielded, and on March 8, 1673, the Declaration was annulled.

  It is probable that by that time the Protestant leaders had got wind of the secret Treaty of Dover. To contracept any royal conversion, both houses passed, at the end of March, a “Test Act,” by which all holders of civil or military office in England were required to abjure the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and to take the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite. Clifford fought the bill passionately; after its passage he resigned from the government, retired to his estate, and soon died—by suicide, Evelyn thought. Shaftesbury warmly supported the bill; he was dismissed from the ministry, and made himself the leader of the “Country Party” that opposed, to the verge of revolution, the “Court Party” favoring the King. The Cabal ended (1673); the Earl of Danby became chief minister.

  James resigned his offices. The opposition to him had been in some degree mollified by the fact that though his first wife had accepted Catholicism, her children, the future Queens Mary and Anne, were being brought up as Protestants. But now his marriage (September 30, 1673) to a Catholic princess roused virulent condemnation. Mary of Modena was branded as “the Pope’s eldest daughter,” and it was assumed that she would bring up her children as Catholics. Bills were at once introduced into Parliament that all royal children must be reared in the Protestant faith.

  The turn of events soured England’s taste for the war against the United Provinces. If England should have a Catholic king he would sooner or later join France and Spain in utterly destroying the Dutch Republic—which now appeared not as a commercial rival but as the bulwark of Protestantism on the Continent. If that should fall, how would English Protestantism stand? Charles willingly commissioned Sir William Temple to conclude a separate peace with the Dutch. On February 9, 1674, the Treaty of Westminster ended the Third Dutch War.

  VIII. THE “POPISH PLOT”

  An almost lucid interval followed. Having received an additional 500,000 crowns from Louis, Charles prorogued his troublesome Parliament and returned to his mistresses. But politics continued. Shaftesbury and other opposition leaders established (1675) the Green Ribbon Club, and from that center the Country Party issued its propaganda to defend Parliament and Protestantism against a King plotting with Catholic France and an heir apparent wedded to a Catholic wife. By 1680 these men of the Country Party had come to be called Whigs, and the defenders of the royal power were labeled Tories.* Shaftesbury seemed to Charles “the weakest and wickedest of men,” 141 and Burnet rated his “learning superficial, . . . his vanity ridiculous, . . . his reasoning loose”; 142 but John Locke, who lived with Shaftesbury for fifteen years, thought him a brave defender of civil, religious, and philosophical liberty. Burnet called him a deist; and we might suspect as much from Shaftesbury’s remark that “wise men are of but one religion.” When a lady asked which one that was, he answered, “Wise men never tell.” 143

  The religious tension fell slightly in 1677, when William of Orange married Protestant Mary, eldest daughter of the Duke of York; if James continued to have no male issue, Mary would be next to him in line for the throne, and England would be joined in marriage with the Protestant Dutch. But on August 28, 1678, Titus Oates came before the King, and announced that he had discovered a “Popish plot”: the Pope, the King of France, the Archbishop of Armagh, and the Jesuits of England, Ireland, and Spain were planning to kill Charles, enthrone his brother, and impose Catholicism in England by the sword; three thousand cutthroats were to massacre the leading Protestants of London, and London itself, the citadel of English Protestantism, was to be burned to the ground.

  Oates, then twenty-nine, was the son of an Anabaptist preacher. He had become an Anglican clergyman, but had been expelled from his benefice for disorderly conduct. 144 He had accepted, or pretended, conversion to Catholicism, and had studied in Jesuit colleges at Valladolid and St.-Omer, from which last he had been expelled; 145 meanwhile, he now claimed, he had learned the secret plans of the Jesuits for the conquest of England. He professed to have been present on April 24, 1678, at a Jesuit conference in London, which had discussed means of killing the King. He named five Catholic peers as in the plot: Arundell, Powis, Petre, Stafford, and Bellasis. When Oates added that Bellasis was to be commander in chief of the papist army, Charles laughed, for Bellasis was bedridden with gout; the King concluded that Oates had fabricated the story in hopes of reward, and dismissed him.

  The Privy Council thought it safer to assume some truth in the charges. It summoned Oates to appear before it on September 28. Fearing that he would be imprisoned, Oates went before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a justice of the peace, and left with him a sworn deposition detailing the plot. The Council, impressed by his testimony, ordered the arrest of several papists implicated by him. One of these was Edward Coleman, who had been for some years (till dismissed at the King’s bidding) secretary to the Duchess of York. Before the arrest, Coleman burned some of his papers, but those that he had no time to burn showed that he had carried on with Père La Chaise, the Jesuit confessor of Louis XIV, correspondence expressing on both sides the hope that England would soon be made Catholic. In these letters Coleman suggested that Louis XIV should send him money to influence members of Parliament in the Catholic interest, and added: “Success will give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it has received since its birth, . . . the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that, perhaps, the utter subduing of a pestilent heresy.” 146 The fact that Coleman had destroyed most of his correspondence led the Council to believe that he had known of, perhaps had been an agent in, the plot described by Oates. Charles himself concluded from these letters that some real plot existed.

  On October 12 Justice Godfrey disappeared. Five days later his corpse was found in a suburban field. He had evidently been murdered—by agents, and for reasons, still unknown, but the Protestants ascribed the assassination to Catholics who hoped to prevent the publication of Oates’s deposition. This event seemed to confirm the charges; and in the atmosphere of distrust left by the secret Treaty of Dover, and the fear of James’s accession, it was natural that most of Protestant England should now credit all the accusations made by Oates, and should fall into a frenzy in which the protection of Protestantism seemed to require the arrest, if not the execution, of any Catholic named in the conspiracy.

  A reign of terror began which continued for almost f
our years. James fled to the Netherlands. The citizens of London armed themselves to resist an expected invasion; cannon were planted in Whitehall; guards were placed in the vaults beneath the Houses of Parliament to circumvent a second Gunpowder Plot. Parliament passed a bill excluding Catholics from the House of Lords. It hailed Oates as the savior of the nation, awarded him a life pension of twelve hundred pounds a year, and gave him an apartment in Whitehall Palace. Soon the prisons were filled with Jesuits, secular priests, and Catholic laymen implicated by Oates or by William Bedloe, who came forward claiming knowledge that would substantiate Oates’s charges.

  On November 24 Oates laid before the Council a new and startling accusation—that he had heard the Queen consent to the poisoning of her husband by her physician. Charles caught Oates in a demonstrable lie, lost faith in his stories, and had him arrested. The Commons ordered him freed, arrested three servants of the Queen, and voted an address demanding the Queen’s removal. Charles came to the upper house, defended his wife’s loyalty, and persuaded the Lords to refuse concurrence in the Commons’ address. On November 27 Coleman and another Catholic layman were tried, were found guilty of treason, and were executed. On December 17 six Jesuits and three secular priests were put to death, and on February 5, 1679, three men were hanged for the murder of Godfrey. These twelve were later proved innocent.

  The attack pressed closer to the King. On December 19, 1678, Parliament received from Paris communications showing that Danby had accepted large sums of money from Louis XIV. The minister refused to explain that these sums were French subsidies to the King. The Commons impeached him, and Charles, fearing that his loyal councilor would be condemned to death, dissolved the “Cavalier Parliament” (January 24, 1679), which had sat, discontinuously, for almost eighteen years—longer than the Long Parliament.

  But the first “Whig” Parliament, which met on March 6, was more passionately anti-Catholic and anti-King than its predecessor. The Commons charged Danby with treason; the Lords saved him by committing him to the Tower, where he remained in comfort and anxiety during the five following turbulent years. On the advice of Sir William Temple Charles named a new Council of thirty members; to appease the opposition he included in it the two leaders of the Whig Party, Shaftesbury and George Savile, Marquis of Halifax; and on the King’s recommendation Shaftesbury was chosen lord president of the Council. To further calm the storm, Charles offered to Parliament a compromise substitute for the exclusion of his brother from the throne: no Catholic should be admitted to Parliament or hold any place of trust; the king should lose the power to make ecclesiastical appointments; his nomination of judges should be subject to Parliamentary approval; and Parliament should control the army and navy. 147 But Parliament felt no confidence that James would honor such an agreement. On May 11 Shaftesbury himself introduced the first exclusion bill in unmistakable terms: “to disable the Duke of York to inherit the imperial crown of this realm.” On May 26 the Parliament honored itself by extending the right of habeas corpus: the right to release on bail was assured to every arrested person except those charged with treason or felony; and in these cases the prisoner was to be tried at the next session of the court, or be discharged. France was to wait no years before enjoying similar safeguards against arbitrary arrests. On May 27 the King, fearing that the Exclusion Bill would be passed, prorogued the Parliament.

  The right of habeas corpus did not help the papists accused by Oates, for they were tried with little delay, and, if found guilty of treason, were executed with angry haste. All through 1679 they went to the scaffold or the block. Trials were expeditious because the judges, frightened by the cries of the bloodthirsty crowds outside the court, condemned many of the defendants without dissecting the evidence or allowing cross-examination of witnesses. False witnesses, noting the rewards enjoyed by Oates, arose as if by incantation, and swore to the wildest tales: one, that an army of thirty thousand men was coming from Spain; another, that he had been promised five hundred pounds and canonization if he would kill the King; another, that he had heard a rich Catholic banker vow to do the same. 148 No counsel was allowed to the accused; he was not told till the day of trial what the accusation would be; and he was assumed to be guilty unless he could prove his innocence. 149 To make conviction easier, an old Elizabethan law was revived that made it a capital crime for a priest to be in England. The surrounding crowds hooted and pelted witnesses for the defense, and shouted with joy when verdicts of guilty were announced. 150

  All this was a heartbreaking experience for the once Merrie Monarch, who saw all his hopes shattered, his powers reduced, his wife humiliated, his brother scorned and set aside. At the height of the storm he fell so seriously ill that his death was expected at any hour. Halifax summoned James from Brussels. The Whig leaders ordered the army to prevent his return; and Shaftesbury, Monmouth, Lord Russell, and Lord Grey agreed that in case Charles should die they would lead an insurrection to prevent the accession of his brother. 151 James found entry in disguise, and made his way to the bedside of the King. Charles apparently recovered, and smiled at the fears with which even his enemies had contemplated his death. He never really recovered.

  The anti-Catholic fury continued till Oates blundered in the trial of Sir George Wakeman, the Queen’s physician. In testimony before the Council he had exonerated the doctor; in the trial he accused him of planning to poison the King. Chief Justice Scroggs, who had prosecuted the Catholics with vigor, pointed out the contradiction. Wakeman was acquitted, and thereafter Oates’s testimony was more critically heard. The false witnesses who had corroborated him fell away from his support. The execution of Oliver Plunket, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, was the last act of the anti-Catholic terror (July 1, 1681).

  When the fear and passion had subsided, sane men realized that Oates, partly by unsupported suspicions, partly by lies, had sent many innocent men to a premature death. They concluded that there had been no plan to kill the King, or to massacre Protestants, or to burn London. But they felt, too, that a Catholic, though not a “popish,” plot had been real: that leading members of the government had planned or hoped, with the help of funds (and, if necessary, of soldiers) from France, to remove the disabilities of English Catholics, to convert the King, to enthrone his converted brother, and to use every means to re-establish Catholicism as the religion of the state, and ultimately of the people. Practically all this had been contained in the secret Treaty of Dover that had been signed in 1670. Charles had retreated from that agreement, but his desires had not changed, and he was still resolved that his Catholic brother should be king.

  IX. COMOEDIA FINITA

  Shaftesbury was resolved to the contrary. Coleman had confessed, at his trial, that James had known and approved of his correspondence with Père La Chaise. 152 Shaftesbury felt that the accession of James would realize the first stage of the “Popish Plot.” He offered his support to Charles if the King would divorce his barren Queen and marry a Protestant by whom he might have a Protestant son. Charles refused to let Catherine of Braganza repeat the role of Catherine of Aragon. Shaftesbury then turned to the Duke of Monmouth, the King’s bastard, who could not forgive his father for cheating him of the throne by failing to marry his mother. Shaftesbury spread the idea that Charles had really married Lucy Walter, and that the Duke was the legal heir to the throne. Charles countered by a declaration that he had never married anyone but Catherine of Braganza. Finding Shaftesbury irreconcilable, the King dismissed him from the Council (October 13, 1679).

  In this succession of crises Charles almost changed his character. He gave up his life of pleasure and ease, sold his stables, devoted himself to administration and politics, and fought his foes with strategic retreats until they overreached themselves into failure. In his final five years he showed such resolution and ability as surprised even his friends. Recovering his confidence, he called for his fourth Parliament.

  It met on October 21, 1680. In November the second exclusion bill passed the Common
s and was presented to the Lords. Halifax, who had heretofore voted with the Whigs, now veered to the side of the King, and began to earn and flaunt the title of “trimmer.” He detested James and distrusted Catholicism, but he agreed with Charles that the principle of hereditary monarchy should be maintained, and he feared that Shaftesbury was leading England toward another civil war. 153 In a long debate his eloquence and logic persuaded the Lords to reject the bill. The Commons retaliated by refusing funds to the King, and forbidding any merchant or financier to lend him money, and it impeached Halifax, Scroggs, and Viscount Stafford—one of the five Catholic lords imprisoned in the Tower. Stafford was condemned to death on the testimony of Oates, and was beheaded (December 7). The King dismissed the Parliament (January 18, 1681).

  Rather than sacrifice his brother to his need for funds, Charles decided to finance the government by becoming again a pensioner of Louis XIV. He consented to look with equanimity upon the aggressive policies of France in return for £ 700,000 154—enough to make him independent of parliamentary subsidies for three years. So sinewed, he summoned his fifth Parliament. To deprive it of support from the mobs and militia of London, he ordered it to meet at Oxford. Both sides came in arms—Charles with numerous guards, the Whig leaders with retainers carrying swords and pistols and flying banners reading “No Popery, No Slavery.” The Commons at once passed the third exclusion bill. Before the measure could reach the Lords, Charles dismissed the Parliament (March 28, 1681).

  Many men now expected Shaftesbury to resort to civil war; and public opinion, remembering 1642–60, turned against him and rallied to the King. The Anglican clergy zealously defended the right of Catholic James to the throne. When Shaftesbury tried to reorganize the disbanded Commons into a revolutionary convention, 155 Charles ordered his arrest. A jury acquitted Shaftesbury (November 24); and though he was now so ill that he could barely walk, he joined with the Duke of Monmouth in open revolution. 156 The King had both of them arrested. Shaftesbury escaped from the Tower, fled to Holland, and died there (January 21, 1683), worn out, but leaving his friend Locke to carry on in philosophy the struggle that had for a time been lost in politics.