The King hoped that a new Parliament might serve him better than the last one, and in July it was announced that Parliament was dissolved and elections would be called for another, which would meet on 7 October. Many elections for this Parliament were contested (an unusual enough fact in the seventeenth century when many ‘contests’ were in fact ‘selections’ cooked up between local grandees) and again the cry of the electorate was ‘no courtier’. Fears about the succession were raised anew, as Charles suffered from a severe fever in August, leading James to return from exile in Brussels in case his brother should die. This illness brought the Duke back into English politics and allowed him to face down his main rival for the succession, the Duke of Monmouth, who was himself forced into exile on 24 September. Shaftesbury, mean-while, left the Privy Council to return to open opposition.
Charles, under pressure from James, agreed to prorogue the meeting of Parliament for another eight days. In the meantime fears about a Popish Plot were reinvigorated by a new piece of Catholic subterfuge, ‘the Meal Tub Plot’. On 20 October Thomas Dangerfield, alias Whilloughby, was arrested. He led the authorities to papers that seemed to show that Sir Robert Peyton and various Green Ribbon Club members (who were predominantly sympathetic to the Whig party) and Presbyterians had planned mass armed resistance to York’s succession. But this ‘Presbyterian Plot’ hindered rather than helped the Catholic cause when it was revealed that Dangerfield was the stooge of a Catholic midwife, Elizabeth Cellier. Evidence was found hidden in her meal tub that this was in fact a Catholic plot to throw the Protestants into confusion and the idea of a popish conspiracy was given a new lease of life. Mass ‘pope-burning’ processions were organised on 5 and 17 November (the second to tie in with Elizabeth I’s accession day). The procession on the 17th was particularly elaborate, with a figure representing ‘Sir Edmund Godfrey, on horseback, murdered, in a black wig and pale-faced, and behind him rode one of the murders’.17 The event was said to have been witnessed by over a hundred thousand spectators, including the King himself, and, in disguise, the French ambassador.
Popular pressure, however, did little to persuade the King to recall Parliament. When Shaftesbury and fifteen other peers stopped the King on his way to chapel and presented him with a petition for the sitting of Parliament his response was to postpone it until November 1680 and issue a proclamation against petitioning which immediately became the talk of the town. The petitioning campaign in the winter of 1679–80 did not manage to get Parliament recalled, but it did have the effect of convincing some that Charles, and not his brother, was the real problem, and others that the populist tactics of the Whigs were going too far and order needed to be restored.
In the spring of 1680 Charles was taking steps to crush opposition to him. JPs and other officers were purged and the Corporation Act (aimed at keeping Protestant dissenters out of public office) was rigorously enforced. Local authorities were encouraged to prosecute both nonconformity and Catholic recusancy. The Duke of York was recalled from Scotland and the King made a show of fraternal affection by attending with him an entertainment at the house of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Clayton. Bishop Carleton of Chichester was impressed by the change in the state of affairs: ‘the dissenting party in all parts of this country are more crestfallen since his majesty began to act like himself, like a King and to let people know they are but subjects’. The Popish Plot, too, was running out of steam. By May 1680 it was alleged that even in London it was thought ‘only a piece of state pageantry, and no real thing, and that mischief, if true, was full satisfied in the death of those few miscreant martyrs’.18 Tory propagandists such as Sir Roger L’Estrange were now successfully arguing that it was in fact the nonconformists and their political allies the Whigs who were the real plotters, bent on reviving the upheaval and misery of the Civil War era.
Shaftesbury and his allies now had to rely on rather desperate tactics to keep the issue of the succession before the public. In June a Middlesex grand jury was persuaded not only to petition the King for Parliament to sit but also to indict the Duke of York as a popish recusant and the Duchess of Portsmouth, the King’s French mistress, as a common whore, though the attempt was thwarted by Sir William Scroggs. In midsummer Henry Cornish and Slingsby Bethel, radical exclusionists (and in Bethel’s case, a republican), were elected as London’s sheriffs but were disqualified because they had not taken the Anglican sacrament, as required by the test act. They quickly qualified themselves and were elected again at a disorderly meeting in July at which one of the sheriffs was ‘taken by the throat and punched in the breast’.19 The Duke of Monmouth paraded in the West Country, drawing well-wishers wherever he went and styling himself as a rightful prince and claimant to the succession (the baton-sinister, denoting his illegitimacy, was erased from his coat of arms on his coach.)
Charles issued a proclamation on 26 August that Parliament would finally meet in October. There was a widespread belief that the King might still accept the idea of exclusion, if it was tied to a generous financial package from Parliament. When Parliament sat it immediately displayed its independent spirit by electing its own speaker in William Williams, rather than waiting for royal guidance, and taking the then revolutionary step of printing each day’s votes. The plot was again dragged back into the political limelight, as Dangerfield alleged that James had urged him to kill the King. This provided the pretext for the revival of the discussion of exclusion.
On 4 November a new Exclusion bill was brought in, to which a proviso was added that James would be treated as if he were dead and the Crown would pass to Mary and William of Orange as heirs, disappointing Monmouth’s ambitions. Now the King brought his pressure to bear. In a debate in the Lords on 15 November, with Charles standing by the fire, the peers voted down the bill by sixty-three votes to thirty. Frustrated at this attempt, the Commons tried to bring in exclusion by the back door by adopting the suggestion of an Association modelled on the Elizabethan precedent, but with the proviso that all who refused it would be excluded from office (a move again aimed at the Duke of York). MPs attempted to sweeten the pill by offering the King money for the garrison at Tangier, the fleet and the maintenance of alliances if he would accept the bills to exclude the Duke of York, create an Association and guarantee frequent Parliaments, but Charles officially refused this offer on 4 January 1681. Again the King used his prerogative to prorogue Parliament on 10 January; it was scheduled to meet again on the 20th. However, on the 18th he dissolved his troublesome Parliament and called a new one, to meet in Oxford in March.
New elections again saw opponents of the court harping on the dangers of popery, and Shaftesbury finally managed to get James presented as a popish recusant to the Middlesex Grand Jury. However, there was also a growing public feeling that the last two Parliaments had been too obstructive and had achieved little. At the Bristol election candidates sympathetic to dissent were defeated and members loyal to Church and State returned in their place. Moreover, behind the scenes, precisely the sort of secret diplomacy that in Montagu’s revelations had sealed the fate of Danby, was again taking place. Charles was offered £385,000 over three years by the French ambassador if he would give up his alliance with Spain and keep England’s Gallophobic Parliament from sitting.
When the Oxford Parliament met it quickly got back to the themes of the Popish Plot and Exclusion. The Commons tried to bring in another witness, Edward Fitzharris, who claimed to have evidence against York, the Queen and the Duchess of Portsmouth, but the Lords refused to agree to this. The King presented his proposals for a regency – Princess Mary was to govern during the reign of her father – but this too failed to satisfy MPs, who again voted to bring in an Exclusion bill. On Monday morning, as MPs gave the bill its first reading, they were interrupted by a summons to Christ Church hall, where the King dissolved Parliament so suddenly that only Charles, but none of the Lords, was in his robes. The King departed for Windsor after lunch, leaving MPs to pack their bags and go home. There w
ould never be another Parliament called in his reign.
How do we explain the atmosphere of panic that followed Godfrey’s death and yet the relative ease with which Charles eventually dismissed the Exclusion Parliaments? It is important first of all to understand why the fantastic allegations of Oates, Tonge, Bedloe and Prance were so easily believed and went so unchallenged (even though some individuals, especially the King, were aware that they were, at least in part, false). The reaction of Parliament and the general public to news of a Popish Plot should not be dismissed as mass hysteria. Since the Elizabethan era anti-popery had emerged as a potent force in English politics. The notion of a Catholic conspiracy to subvert Protestantism and suppress English liberties was given credence by the real threat from the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Later in the seventeenth century the threat of popery was located closer to the Crown, as Charles I’s evil counsellors and Catholic Queen were seen as encouraging him to raise an Irish army to crush Parliament and bring in Romanism by the back door via the introduction of ‘Arminian’ ceremony and liturgy in the Church of England. When a real Catholic rebellion broke out in November 1641 in Ireland, with the rebels claiming to be acting on the King’s behalf, it was widely believed that they had slaughtered two hundred thousand Protestant settlers, many times the number of Protestants in Ireland at that time. Fear of popery played a major part in leading England into civil war and was an important recruiting slogan for Parliament’s army.
Charles II well understood that questioning Oates and Tonge’s story too seriously would not discredit them but rather leave him open to accusation that he was soft on popery. The atmosphere of fear and paranoia was exacerbated by the fact that Oates’s revelations did not become public knowledge until April 1679. Before that date only the council and Parliament (whose debates remained officially secret) knew the precise details, while the wider population was left only with rumour and speculation. In the meantime London’s Catholics were viewed with intense suspicion. One William Staley, the son of wealthy Catholic banker, was hung, drawn and quartered on 26 November 1678 for apparently stating (in French) that the King was a great heretic and that he, Staley, was ready to kill him himself. Charles showed some compassion and allowed Staley’s body to be handed over to his family. The Privy Council, however, contradicted the King’s order and insisted that Staley’s corpse be given the usual treatment reserved for traitors. His body was exhumed from his family grave, the head impaled on London bridge and the four quarters on the gates of the City.
The localities were also in a state of panic. There were reports of armed Catholics riding at night from Yorkshire in the north to Gloucestershire in the south-west. Those who questioned the official version of Godfrey’s death were punished by the courts. In June 1682 two men were fined and pilloried for printing and publishing letters which implied that Godfrey had committed suicide. The magistrate’s reputation as a martyr for the Protestant cause was not to be besmirched. During the Exclusion Crisis all claims to truthfulness were viewed through the distorting lens of anti-popery. The nonconformist Roger North summed up the atmosphere of the time: ‘It was not safe for anyone to show scepticism. For upon the least occasion of that sort, What, replied they, don’t you believe in the Plot? (As if the plot were turned into a creed) … And this sort was the reasoning at that time even amongst the better sort of people who should have known better.’20
This should not lead us to the mistaken conclusion that the politics of 1678–85 were all about popish plots and the succession of a Catholic to the throne. Many other issues contributed to the turbulence of these years: fears about what uses the King’s army would be put to (as in 1641) and whether it would become a permanent or standing force; suspicions about the secret diplomacy Charles was conducting with Louis XIV and the extent to which he had simply become a pensionary of the French monarch; and concerns about the need to limit the powers of the present King as much as those of a popish successor. This heated political environment led to the development of the first proper party system in Parliament, with the emergence of Whig and Tory groupings.
The differences between Whig and Tory groupings used to be characterised almost wholly in constitutional terms, with the Tories seen as advocates of divine-right royal absolutism and the Whigs as supporters of parliamentary constitutionalism and even, in the case of some radicals, republicanism. These distinctions are misleading as many Tories believed as firmly in legal monarchy and the rule of law as some moderate Whigs did, a fact which helps explain how so many Anglican Tories came to oppose their rightful King during the Glorious Revolution. The key divide between the two groups came over the Church, with the Whigs more sympathetic to dissent and the Tories supporting an intolerant Anglicanism, though it should be stressed that both groups were violently anti-Catholic. The splits that emerged in the later 1680s can largely be explained in terms of what individuals saw as the greater threat to Church and State: Protestant nonconformity or Roman Catholicism.
The idea of excluding James from inheriting the throne had been around since the mid-1670s, so the term ‘Exclusion Crisis’ is a poor way of describing the politics of this period. Many other options were discussed for dealing with the problem of succession; the placing of limitations on the powers of a Catholic King, such as removing his control over the appointment of ecclesiastical and civil officers; the prospect of a regency, with James’s daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange, reigning in his place; the legitimation of the Duke of Monmouth, the King’s oldest bastard son, or a royal divorce so that Charles could remarry and beget a Protestant heir. Nonetheless, once Whigs had successfully implicated the Duke of York in the Popish Plot, as certified by a Commons vote on 27 April 1679, subsequent Parliaments in 1680 and 1681 came to be dominated by the discussion of Exclusion bills. Whig propaganda revived the horrors of Mary Tudor’s reign as an example of what life under a Catholic monarch would be like, but they also pointed to Louis XIV’s France and his persecution of the Huguenots as a model that James would doubtless follow in England. Tied in with this was the problem of standing armies, which the Whigs urged would be maintained by a Catholic King in order to pursue his religious policies. That army would have to be supported by a heavy burden of taxation, reducing the English people to a dreadful poverty.
The Whigs’ support for exclusion reverses the old historical notion that they were advocates of mixed-monarchy or parliamentary constitutionalism. As they readily admitted, ‘limitation’ proposals offered by the court actually encroached on royal prerogative far more than exclusion would have. Radical Whigs, such as the ex-Leveller John Wildman and the classical republican Henry Neville, tended to distance themselves from exclusion proposals. However, in one very fundamental way Whigs did display the belief that government derived its authority from the people. By arguing that Parliament and King could together alter the line of succession, they were suggesting that the people’s representatives could choose whom they wished to have as their head of state. Whig support for Exclusion was combined with their defence of Protestant nonconformists. They blamed the bishops in the House of Lords for the failure of the second Exclusion bill in November 1680 and accused Tories of being more ready to set up a mass ‘than shake hands with a Presbyterian’.
Tories, on the other hand, argued that monarchs ruled by divine right and therefore the hereditary succession could not be broken. They revived the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer, whose most famous work, Patriarcha, published in 1680 but written during the civil wars, argued that God had given the world to Adam and his heirs in succession, exclusive of the rest of posterity. However, Tories did not rely solely on these absolutist arguments but urged that a popish successor was due obedience according the law. James was the next rightful heir according to English law and, indeed, the law would protect the English people from the possible dangers of having a popish monarch. He could not, they urged, make laws, or alter the constitution of the government without the consent of a P
arliament. In fact, it was the Whigs, not James, they claimed, who wanted to destroy the constitution. While admitting the reality of the Popish Plot, the Tories stated that the Whigs were using it to alter and ruin the government both in Church and State. They linked Whiggery to the Puritans/parliamentarians of the 1640s who had killed their King and set up a republic in his place. Whig support for toleration would only help the growth of popery in England and the internal divisions that their policies would provoke would weaken the country and make it vulnerable to French attack. The mental connections made in English minds between popery and arbitrary government allowed Tories to argue that the real Popish Plot was being fostered by Puritan ‘commonwealthsmen’ (radical Whigs).
From 1679 to 1681 the opposition to the Crown appeared to be very strong and the Whigs secured majorities in the Commons for Exclusion bills in October 1680, January 1681 and March 1681. Momentum was sustained by mass petitioning for the early recall of Parliament. In January 1680 Charles was presented with two petitions from London and Wiltshire signed by a total of ninety thousand people. However, loyalty to the crown and the Anglican Church could also inspire popular support. The Tories responded with their own counter-petitioning campaign, abhorring the positions of their Whig rivals. Charles II’s Declaration of April 1681 explaining why he had dissolved the last Parliament of his reign prompted 210 loyal addresses from the localities. Further addresses followed in the wake of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s alleged plans to form an armed Protestant Association to resist the Duke of York and more petitions, abhorring the Whigs’ regicidal plan known as the Rye House Plot, followed in 1683.
The Glorious Revolution Page 5