The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Charles pardoned Monmouth, but he could not forgive the London jury that had acquitted Shaftesbury. Becoming extreme in his turn, he resolved to destroy the autonomy of the cities, for it was in these that Whig—even revolutionary—sentiment flourished. He ordered an examination of the city charters that permitted such municipal flouting of the royal will. Legal flaws were found in them; they were declared null; and new charters were issued by which all municipally elected officials were henceforth to be subject to veto or removal by the king (1683). Freedom of speech and press were now subjected to new restraints. A persecution of Dissenters (not of Catholics) was begun, for the Dissenters were mostly Whigs; and in Scotland James personally led the oppression. The triumph of royal prerogative over parliamentary privilege seemed complete, and the achievements of the Great Rebellion were apparently to be sacrificed in a royalist reaction supported by a nation fearful of renewed civil war. Halifax reflected the feeling of the country when he abandoned Shaftesbury and turned his temperate wisdom to serve the King (1682–85) as lord privy seal.

  The followers of Shaftesbury made a final attempt. In January, 1683, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Carlisle, William Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney met at the house of John Hampden (grandson of the Civil War hero), and laid plans to circumvent James and, if necessary, assassinate Charles. Sidney hoped to proceed further and reestablish the English republic. He was the grandson of a brothei of Sir Philip Sidney, the “President of Chivalry.” He fought on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War, and was wounded at Marston Moor. Appointed as one of the commission to try Charles I, he refused to serve, saying that the commission had received no authority from the people to try the King. Finding himself on the Continent at the Restoration, he stayed there, engaged in studies and in plots against Charles II. During the Second Dutch War he urged the Dutch to invade England, and he offered his services to the French government to raise a rebellion in England if it would supply him with 100,000 crowns. 157 Charles allowed him to return to England (1677) to attend the death of his father. Remaining in England, he joined the Country Party. In Discourses Concerning Government (written in 1681 but not published till 1688), he advocated semirepublican principles, anticipated Locke by attacking Filmer’s defense of divine right in kings, and asserted the right of the people to judge and depose their rulers. Apparently both he and Russell accepted money from the French government, which was interested in keeping Charles II busy with domestic troubles. 158

  The “Council of Six” decided to capture the King. It was known that in March he would attend the horse races at Newmarket; on his return to London his coach would pass by Rye House, at Hoddesdon, north of the city; a cart of hay was to block the road there; the King, and perhaps his brother, were to be taken, alive or dead. But on March 22 a fire broke out at the racecourse; the races were ended a week sooner than scheduled, and Charles passed safely to London before the conspirators could advance their preparations. On June 12 one of them, fearing exposure and hoping for pardon, betrayed the plot to the government. Carlisle, arrested, confirmed the confession, and was forgiven. Monmouth protested innocence, and though Charles knew that his son was lying, he canceled the order for his arrest. Russell was tried, convicted, and executed (July 21, 1683). Essex killed himself in jail. “He needed not to have despaired of mercy,” said the King, “for I owed him a life”; 159 Essex’ father had died for Charles I. Several minor participants in this “Rye House Plot” were hanged. Sidney was convicted on technically inadequate evidence; he defended himself ably, and met his death like a Roman (December 7). His motto had been Manus haec inimica tyrannis—“This hand is the foe of tyrants”; but he had chosen a double-edged sword. On the scaffold he uttered notable words: “God has left nations unto the liberty of setting up such governments as please themselves.” 160 He refused any religious attendance, saying that he was already at peace with God.

  Charles had won, but he was through. He enjoyed, wearily, a new popularity. England had prospered economically under his reign, and now, longing for political quiet, it rallied to a ruler who represented national continuity and order, even if that meant for a time a Catholic king. It forgave Charles his faults as it saw him fading into premature decline. It half agreed with him that a monarchy elective and not hereditary invited periodical turmoil. It respected his loyalty to his brother, even while it mourned the result. It saw James triumphant, again lord high admiral, already pursuing his enemies vengefully. In January, 1685, James brought and won a civil suit against Titus Oates for £ 100,000 damages; Oates, unable to pay this great sum, was imprisoned. “When I am dead and gone,” said Charles sadly, “I know not what my brother will do; I am very much afraid that when he comes to wear the crown he will be obliged to travel again. And yet I will take care to leave my kingdoms to him in peace, wishing he may keep them long so. But this hath all of my fears, little of my hopes, and less of my reason.” 161 When James expostulated with him for driving about London unguarded, he bade him calm his fears: “No one will kill me to make you king.” 162

  He should have excepted the doctors. On February 2, 1685, he suffered a convulsion; his face was distorted, his mouth foamed. Dr. King bled him by lancing a vein, with good effect. But attendants summoned eighteen other physicians to diagnose and prescribe. For five tortured days he submitted to their united attack. They tapped his veins, put cupping glasses to his shoulders, cut off his hair to raise blisters on his scalp, and applied to the soles of his feet plasters of pitch and pigeon dung. “To remove the humours from his brain,” says a medical historian, “they blew hellebores up his nostrils and set him sneezing. To make him vomit they poured antimony and sulphate of zinc down his throat. To clear his bowels they gave him strong purgatives and a brisk succession of clysters.” 163

  The dying King called for his long-suffering wife, not perceiving that she was already kneeling at the foot of the bed, rubbing his feet. On February 4 some bishops offered him the last rites of the Anglican Church, but he begged them to desist. When his brother asked him did he want a Catholic priest, he answered, “Yes, yes, with all my heart.” 164 Father John Huddleston, who had saved Charles’s life at the battle of Worcester, and whose life Charles had saved in the Popish Terror, was sent for; Charles made profession of the Roman Catholic faith, confessed his sins, pardoned his enemies, asked pardon of all, and received extreme unction and the last sacrament. He asked pardon especially of his wife; but also he bade his brother take care of Louise de Kéroualle and his children, and “let not poor Nelly starve.” 165 He apologized to those around him for taking so unconscionable a time dying. 166

  By noon of February 6 the Duke of York was King.

  CHAPTER X

  The Glorious Revolution

  1685–1714

  I. THE CATHOLIC KING: 1685–88

  WHO would have fancied, from Vandyck’s beautiful blue-and-gold portrait 1 of the Duke of York at the age of two, that this innocent, sensitive, diffident child would ruin the Stuart dynasty and finally complete, in the “Glorious Revolution,” that transfer of power from king to Parliament which his father had ingloriously begun? But in Riley’s portrait 2 of the same soul as James II the diffidence has become bewilderment, the sensitivity has changed into obstinacy, and the innocence has passed through compliant mistresses to an inflexible theology. That character determined a tragic fate in which, as in all great tragedies, every participant fought for what seemed to him right, and can claim a portion of our sympathy.

  We have already noted some of his virtues. He repeatedly exposed himself to danger of death in his naval career. Men compared him favorably with his brother in administrative industry, in modesty of expenditure, in fidelity to his word. He observed Charles’s dying injunction to take care of Nell Gwyn: he paid her debts, and settled upon her an estate sufficient to maintain her in comfort. After his accession he continued for a while his relations with his latest mistress, Catherine Sedley; but on the remonstrances of Father Petre he rewar
ded her for her services and persuaded her to leave England; for he confessed that if he saw her again he would not be able to resist the hold she had over him. 3 Bishop Burnet, who helped to dethrone him, judged him to be “naturally candid and sincere, though sometimes eager and revengeful; a very firm friend, until his religion had corrupted his first principles and inclinations.” 4 He was frugal and thrifty, kept an honest coinage, and was easy on the people in taxation. 5 Macaulay, after writing eight hundred pages about James’s three-year rule, concluded that “with so many virtues he might, if he had been a Protestant, nay, if he had been a moderate Roman Catholic, have had a prosperous and glorious reign.” 6

  His faults grew with his power. Proud and arrogant even before his accession, scornful of the many and accessible only to a few, he adopted to the letter his father’s theory that the king should have absolute authority; and he had not his brother’s realistic humor to see its practical limitations. We must pay respect to his fervor for his religion, and his desire to give his fellow Catholics in England freedom of worship and equality of political opportunity. He had been devoted to his Catholic mother and sister; he had, for the past fifteen years, been surrounded by Catholics in his own house; and he thought it strange that a religion that produced so many good men and women should be so checked and hated by Englishmen. He did not share the vivid memories that English Protestants transmitted of the Gunpowder Plot, or their fear that a Catholic ruler would be inclined, and be sooner or later persuaded, to adopt only such policies as would not displease an Italian pope. Protestant England felt that its religious, intellectual, and political independence would be imperiled by a Catholic king.

  James’s first moves after his accession slightly relieved these fears. He made Halifax lord president of his Council, Sunderland secretary of state, and Henry Hyde (second Earl of Clarendon) lord privy seal—all Protestants. In his first speech to the Council he promised to maintain the existing institutions in Church and state; he expressed his appreciation of the support that the Church of England had given to his succession, and promised to cherish her with special care. At his coronation he took the usual oath of modern English sovereigns to preserve and protect the Established Church. For some months he enjoyed an unexpected popularity.

  His first pro-Catholic measure carried no direct offense to Protestantism. He ordered the release of all persons imprisoned for refusal to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Thousands of Catholics were thereby freed, but also twelve hundred Quakers and many other Dissenters. He forbade any further prosecutions in matters of religion. He liberated Danby, and the Catholic lords who had been sent to the Tower on charges by Titus Oates. In a new trial Oates was convicted of perjuries that had led to the execution of several innocent persons; the court, expressing regret that it could not condemn him to death, sentenced him to pay a fine of two thousand marks, to be tied to the back of a cart, to be twice publicly whipped—once from Aldgate to Newgate, and two days later from Newgate to Tyburn—and to stand in the pillory five times every year for the remainder of his life. He survived the ordeal, and was returned to jail (May, 1685). James, asked to remit the second whipping, refused.

  The precarious truce of the faiths was broken by a double revolt. In May Archibald Campbell, ninth Earl of Argyll, landed in Scotland, and in June James, Duke of Monmouth, landed on the southwest coast of England, in a joint effort to overthrow the Catholic King. Monmouth’s proclamation denounced James as a usurper, tyrant, and murderer, charged him with the burning of London, the Popish Plot, and the poisoning of Charles, and pledged the invaders to make no peace until they had rescued the Protestant religion and the liberties of the nation and the Parliament. Argyll was overcome on June 17, and executed on June 30; the northern arm of the rebellion failed. But the people of Dorsetshire, strongly Puritan, hailed Monmouth as a savior, and so many men enlisted under his banner that he confidently and solemnly assumed the title of James II, King of England. The nobility and the moneyed classes offered him no support, and his undisciplined army was defeated by the royal forces at Sedgemoor (July 6, 1685)—the last battle fought on English soil before the Second World War. Monmouth fled, begged forgiveness of the King, was refused, and was beheaded.

  The royal army, led by Colonel Percy Kirke, pursued the remainder of the rebels and hanged prisoners without trial. James appointed a commission, headed by Chief Justice Jeffreys, to go into the west country and try persons accused of joining or abetting the revolt. Jury trials were given them, but the juries were so terrorized by Jeffreys that very few of the accused found mercy in these “Bloody Assizes” (September, 1685).* Nearly four hundred were hanged, and eight hundred were condemned to forced labor in the plantations of the West Indies. 7 Elizabeth in 1569 and Cromwell in 1648 had been guilty of similar barbarities, but Jeffreys outdid them by browbeating witnesses and juries, cursing his victims, gloating over them, and giving guilt the benefit of every doubt except when a substantial bribe argued for innocence. 8 James made some modest efforts to check the brutality, but when the holocaust was over he raised Jeffreys to the peerage and made him lord chancellor (September 6, 1686).

  This vengeful pursuit shared in alienating the country from the King. When he asked Parliament for repeal of the Test Act (excluding Catholics from office and Parliament), for modification of the Habeas Corpus Act, and for a standing army under royal command, it refused to comply. James prorogued it (November 20), and proceeded to appoint Catholics to office. When Halifax objected to this flouting of Parliament James dismissed him from the Council, and replaced him, as its lord president, with Sunderland, who presently announced his conversion to Catholicism (1687). When James commended Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 9 England concluded that if James had power as absolute as that of the Bourbon, he would take similar measures against English Protestants. James made no concealment of his belief that his power was already absolute, and that Louis XIV was his ideal of a king. For a time he accepted subsidies from Louis, but he refused to let him dictate the policies of the English government, and the subsidies ended.

  Louis was wiser about England than about his own country; while he weakened France by his persecution of the Huguenots, he cautioned James against haste in Catholicizing England. Pope Innocent XI gave him similar counsel. When James sent word to him promising England’s early submission to the Roman Church, 10 he advised the King to content himself with obtaining toleration for English Catholics; he warned these to abstain from political ambitions, and directed the general of the Jesuits to rebuke Father Petre for taking so prominent a part in the government. 11 Innocent had not abated his Catholic zeal, but he feared the encompassing strength of Louis XIV, and hoped that England could be turned from a servant of French designs to be a makeweight against them. The Pope sent a nuncio to England—the first since Mary Tudor’s reign—to make clear to James that a rupture between Parliament and the King would be injurious to the interests of the Roman Church. 12

  James did not profit from this advice. He felt that, being fifty-two years old at his accession, he had not much time left to effect the religious changes that were dear to his heart. He had little hope of a son; a Protestant daughter would sucçeed him, and would overturn his work unless this should be solidly established before his death. Father Petre and the Queen overruled all counsels of deliberation. The King not only went in royal state to hear Mass, but he asked his councilors to attend him there. Priests in growing number moved about the court. He appointed Catholics to military posts, and persuaded the judges (who were appointed and removable by him) to confirm his right to dispense such appointees from the penalties imposed upon them by the Test Act. He built up, largely under such Catholic officers, an army of thirteen thousand men, subject only to his orders, and obviously threatening the independence of Parliament. He suspended the penalties attached by law to public attendance at Catholic worship. He issued a decree (June, 1686) forbidding clergymen to preach sermons of doctrinal controversy; and when Dr. Joh
n Sharp preached on the motives of converts, James, as legal head of the English Church, ordered Henry Compton, bishop of London, to suspend him from the Anglican ministry. Compton refused. James, overriding a law of 1673, appointed a new Ecclesiastical Commission Court, dominated by Sunderland and Jeffreys; it tried Compton for disobedience to the Crown, and removed him from office. The Anglican Church, which had preached absolute obedience, began to turn against the King.

  He had hoped to win the Anglican Church to reconciliation with Rome, but his precipitate action now excluded that policy; instead, he took up the plan of uniting the Catholics and Dissenters against the Establishment. William Penn, who had found his way into the King’s confidence, advised him that he could bring to his ardent support all the English Protestants but the Anglicans if he should, by a few strokes of the pen, annul all laws forbidding the public worship of the Dissenting sects. On August 4, 1687, James issued his first Declaration of Indulgence. Whatever were his motives, the document holds a place in the history of toleration. It suspended all penal laws affecting religion, abrogated all religious tests, allowed freedom of worship to all, and forbade interference with peaceable religious assemblies. It released all persons who were imprisoned for religious nonconformity. It went beyond the similar declarations of Charles II, which had kept religious tests for office, and had allowed Catholic worship only in private homes. It assured the Established Church that the King would continue to protect it in all its legal rights. It was a pity that this measure had to be an implicit declaration of war against Parliament, which had decreed all the disabilities now annulled. If Parliament were to admit the authority of the King to cancel parliamentary legislation, the Civil War would have to be fought once more.