Unease at James’s rule was, then, growing, but it was very far from being a threat to his authority. However, three events soon turned grumbling discontent into direct opposition. First, James’s cousin, Louis XIV of France, revoked the Edict of Nantes (1598), which had given limited toleration to French Protestants (Huguenots). The persecution that followed was popular within France, but in England it raised fears that James, an admirer and, like his brother, a pensionary of the French king, would attempt something similar in his own kingdom. In fact, James’s hopes for Catholicism in England extended no further than gaining them freedom of worship and the right to occupy public office. This, however, was more than enough to arouse new fears of a Popish Plot, as James attempted to fulfil these aims via prerogative means and the issuing of two Declarations of Indulgence. Finally, the prospect of a long line of Catholic Stuart monarchs was raised as Mary of Modena gave birth to a healthy male heir. No longer could it be hoped that the reign of a popish monarch would be a temporary aberration.
The poem ‘Monmouth Worsted in the West’, probably published in 1688, had the Duke returning to English shores to right the injustices done to his dead soldiers:
Brittain’s Rights I am renewing,
can this give just offence?
Those that glory in my Ruine,
I in time may recompense:
For I’ll have a stronger Army,
And of Amunition more,
I’ll have Drums and Trumpets charming
When up I come on England’s shore.
Whatever the delusions of popular rumour, Monmouth was dead, but in 1688 another pretender to the crown of less than impeccable heredity would land on English shores. His armada would contain far more than three ships and his soldiers were trained professionals, not cloth-workers and farmhands armed with scythes.
3
THE ANGLICAN REVOLT
A strange and astonishing providence the people of God passed under at this time. Now the broken, scattered congregations were gathered again, and such who a while ago were constrained to skulk up and down in the solitary darksome night seasons in secret corners and caves of the earth to worship God, that did gather bread for their souls with the peril of their lives because of the terrible persecution, could now go in flocks and droves and assemble by hundreds in the streets in open public places, and in the view and sight of their enemies to wait upon the Lord in His pure instituted worship, and none that durst make them afraid … now a popish prince was instrumental for easing the burdens of many that did truly fear the Lord. Surely the hearts of kings are in the hands of the Lord, and as the rivers of waters He can turn them whithersoever He will.1
On 20 November Samuel Johnson, Protestant minister and Whig polemicist, was degraded of his ecclesiastical status for writing two seditious libels: ‘An humble and hartie Address to all the Protestants in the present Army’ and ‘The Opinion is this, that Resistance may be used in case our Religion and Rights should be invaded’. Before the Bishops of Durham, Rochester and Peterborough and gathered London clergy, a Bible was put into his hand and then taken from him; his gown and cassock were taken off and he was pronounced and declared to be a mere layman. After his public degradation he was handed over to receive the secular punishments for his crime: he was to stand in the pillory two times, to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn and fined five hundred marks. At the pronouncing of the sentence in the court of King’s Bench, Johnson was reported to have uttered the following words:
‘You whip upon my back Acts of Parliament and the Church of England … It is strange that I must be whipt for manteininge the laws, and the Protestant religion, when dayly are printed and published books conteininge treason.’ And the Court sayinge that was more then they knew, he produced Slaughter’s book of the reasons of his turning Papists, and being reconciled to the Church of Rome, which is treason by the law; and he called on the Atturney Genereal to use his office against him.
He then produced from his pocket several sets of rosary beads, which he hurled at the Attorney-General.2 He was flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails 317 times, but it was said that he never winced. His bravery so impressed the watching public that it was reported that when Johnson stood in the pillory, the crowd would throw nothing at him and gave three cheers when he was taken down.3
Johnson’s punishment, and the public response to it, fit neatly into the classic Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution. Here James II was presented as a brutal, intolerant Catholic demagogue, whose arbitrary rule disgusted the English people and united Protestant opinion against him. However, Johnson, a staunch defender of the idea of an original contract between king and people, would find his opinions no more welcome after the Revolution. In 1692 he was beaten within an inch of his life by an angry mob for attacking the claims of those who argued that William III owed his title to divine providence and/or conquest. Moreover, in the last two years of James II’s reign, English Protestants were anything but united. In pursuing a long-standing plan to establish religious toleration, James II came to reject his brother’s alliance with Anglican Tories and instead attempted, with some success, to create a new politico-religious power base founded on a coalition of English Catholics and Protestant dissenters. The times made for strange political bedfellows, as the Earl of Halifax noted in his Letter to a Dissenter (1687):
Popery is now the only friend to liberty, and the known enemy to persecution; the men of Taunton and Tiverton are above all other eminent for loyalty. The Quakers, from being declared by the Papists not to be Christians, are now made favourites and taken into their particular protection; they are on a sudden grown the most accomplished men of the kingdom in good breeding, and give thanks with the best grace, in double refined language.4
The letter itself was an impassioned plea for Protestants not to support James’s policy of repealing the Test and Corporation Acts. Famously, Halifax warned that they were ‘to be hugged now, only that you may be the better squeezed at another time’.5 Yet, though some did express unease at cooperating with the King, many others, including former Monmouth rebels such as Edward Strode and Nathaniel Wade and Quakers such as Sir William Penn, worked to secure a ‘packed’ Parliament that would remove the penal laws and tests and free up civic, public and religious office for Catholics and dissenters. On the other hand, those who offered stoutest resistance to the Crown were not radical Whig commonwealthsmen like Samuel Johnson but those Anglican Tories who had been the greatest defenders of the hereditary succession in the late 1670s and early 1680s.
Most historians now accept that James did not, in fact, hope to convert England back to Catholicism by force. Although he became a very committed Catholic follower, his conversion had been a lengthy process. He had resisted overtures from his Catholic mother, Henrietta Maria, to convert in the 1650s, and throughout the 1660s he continued to take Anglican communion. Two events resolved this long struggle for his own soul: the secret conversion of his wife, Anne, in 1670 (James prevented Anglican clergy from ministering to her on her deathbed in 1671 so that she could receive Catholic last rites) and his subsequent belief that only the Roman church could offer assurance of salvation. By 1673 James’s religious inclinations had become public knowledge, as he resigned his public office as Lord High Admiral so as not to be in breach of the Test Act and the same year married a Catholic Italian princess, Mary of Modena. The Pope placed the official stamp on James’s conversion in 1676. Nonetheless, when James spoke of wishing to see Catholicism ‘established’ he meant that he wanted to see Catholics afforded the same political and religious freedoms as members of the Church of England, rather than to see Roman Catholicism immediately replace Anglicanism as the national church. (Of course, he hoped and believed that by allowing Catholics to worship openly and publish freely, many conversions would follow.)
As far back as 1674 James, then Duke of York, had been making overtures to English Presbyterians, offering them religious toleration via a royal indulgence in return for their politic
al support.6 His reasons for advocating such a policy were based as much on expediency as principle (he saw this as the best way to protect and advance Catholicism in England while dividing the strength of the Protestants) but in this regard he was no different from the majority of people in the seventeenth century. At this time toleration was often spoken of as being good for trade or for stability but very rarely as being a good thing in itself. However, in his treatment of dissenters, James, like his brother Charles, was able to make a distinction between ‘peaceable’ nonconformists, such as the Quakers, and rebellious ‘fanaticks’, such as the Monmouth rebels. The former were, in James’s view, due the same degree of tolerance as he wished for his fellow Catholics; the latter, for their affront to royal authority, were due severe punishment.
The King’s readiness to brutally repress his rebellious subjects betrayed a deeply authoritarian streak in his character that sat paradoxically with his genuine commitment to toleration. Contemporaries noted that in the last years of Charles II’s reign it had been James who had urged him to exert himself more forcefully, telling him that ‘monarchie must be either more absolute or quite abolished’.7 These traits to James’s character were a legacy of his earlier military career, the experience of which appears never to have left him. As an impoverished exile in France in the 1650s, he had turned to military service under General Turenne as a means of supporting himself, actively taking part in a number of campaigns, including the siege of Arras in 1654. When peace between France and the English protectorate forced James to leave the country, he entered the service of the Spanish monarchy and even fought against English forces at the battle of the Dunes in 1658. At the Restoration he was appointed Lord High Admiral, and despite his brother’s protestations took an active part in military engagements at Lowestoft in 1665 (probably James’s greatest military victory) and less gloriously, Southwold Bay in 1672, when he had to jump ship as his vessel was sunk. That was James’s last naval engagement, as Charles finally lost patience with the heir to the throne repeatedly throwing himself into the firing line. However, James seems to have retained a martial sensibility throughout his life, and his response to disloyalty and insubordination were those of a military commander applying martial law.
Unfortunately for James, his piecemeal attempts to increase the freedoms of his Catholic subjects were already beginning to meet with strong opposition. He had had to prorogue his first Parliament, in part as a result of opposition to the appointment of Catholic officers in the army in contravention of the Test Acts. In January 1686 he issued a royal warrant licensing the printing of Catholic books for use in the royal chapel.8 Obediah Walker, the Master of University College, Oxford, was given royal dispensation to withdraw from Anglican worship and hear mass in his lodgings.9 Catholics were encouraged to worship openly, in the face of legal prohibition, and in the precincts of the Savoy in London the Jesuits established a new academy incorporating a church and a school.10 The Anglican establishment responded to these royal initiatives by organising a rigorous campaign against ‘popery’ through the pulpit and the press.
James tackled his Anglican critics by issuing directions to preachers in March 1686 which ordered the clergy not to discuss the authority or power of the King (particularly his right to dispense with the strictures of penal legislation) but that instead they should stick to reminding subjects of the duties of obedience and subjection according to the homilies.11 Here he was following the example of his father and grandfather, who had both issued similar orders to the clergy against factious preaching (and indeed the debt to the orders of James I and Charles I was revealed in the directions’ prohibition against discussing predestination, a hot topic in the 1620s and 1630s but a dead issue in the 1680s). However, the directions failed to stifle the clergy or subdue the King’s subjects. The Bishop of London, Henry Compton, ignored royal orders to discipline John Sharp, Dean of Norwich and Rector of St Giles in the Fields, for an anti-Catholic sermon. Again James’s reaction to this show of Anglican passive disobedience seemed to share similarities with the actions of earlier Stuart monarchs. The King set up a Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes which used its authority over ecclesiastical persons to suspend Compton from his bishopric. This revived memories of the suspension of Bishop Williams by High Commission during the reign of Charles I. The court of High Commission had been abolished and its powers outlawed by the Long Parliament, and unlike other parts of the Anglican establishment it was not legally restored after the Restoration. There were very good reasons, then, for arguing that the commission was illegal.12 At his appearance before the court in August, Compton contested its authority and demanded to see a copy of its commission, a request which was peremptorily refused by the commission’s president, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys (formerly Judge Jeffreys).13
In London the Anglican-Tory crowds, who had remained largely loyal during the Monmouth rebellion, demonstrated their opposition to the increasingly public nature of Catholic worship in the capital. Here the catalyst was the opening of a Catholic chapel in Lime Street in April 1686. This was supposedly for the private use of a foreign dignitary, the Elector Palatine, but was clearly part of James’s plan to reintroduce public Catholic worship into England. Under prompting from Compton, the Lord Mayor of London had already complained about the plans for the chapel, and its opening provoked rioting in the city. Priests were attacked and a crucifix was taken from the building and placed on the parish pump. The city militia, the trained bands, refused to subdue the rioters, arguing that, as they were only engaged in ‘pulling down Popery’ they could not ‘in conscience hinder’ them. In Bristol the Tory Lord Mayor arrested Catholics found celebrating mass, brazenly telling some who threatened to inform the King of his activities that he would save them the bother and do it himself.14
The hostility of both the clergy and the Tory magistracy to his designs led James to reactivate the proposals made in the 1670s for an alliance between Catholicism and Protestant dissent grounded on the offer of religious toleration. In March 1686 he issued warrants releasing a number of Quakers from prison and exempted William Penn from the obligation to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, opening the way for him to occupy public office.15 In June 1686 the King’s use of his dispensing power to free individuals from the provisions of the Test Acts and penal laws was upheld in the courts in the test case of Godden v Hales. At the same time the King issued pardons to a number of Monmouth rebels who had been exempted from provisions of the general pardon. This activity caused consternation in Somerset, where it was said that some former rebels behaved ‘very insolently to the fear of his Majesty’s loyal subjects by threatening to sue them for pretended trespasses during the said rebellion and otherwise molesting them’.16
While increasing his overtures to the nonconformists, James stepped up his efforts to break the Anglican monopoly on university education. The dispensations given to Obediah Walker aroused relatively little opposition in Oxford, but in July 1686 the King nominated John Massey as Dean of Christ Church even though he was a mere MA who had progressed no further than deacon’s orders. In addition to his lack of academic qualifications, the royal dispensations from taking all oaths and the sacramental test clearly signalled that he was a Catholic. Once installed, however, the new Dean was given scant respect by either Fellows or students. Massey was jeered by students and his attempts to set up a Catholic chapel in the college disrupted.17 At Cambridge Edward Spence of Jesus College was compelled to make a public recantation for delivering a speech before the university satirising the Roman Catholic Church.18 As in Church and State more generally, the King’s aim was not to replace Protestant personnel at both universities en masse with Catholic placemen. Gilbert Burnet, one of William of Orange’s chief propagandists and later made Bishop of Salisbury, reported that James’s aim was that by frightening the universities into submission they might be encouraged to set up one or two Catholic colleges ‘and then as the king sometimes said in the circle, they who taught best would be
most followed’.19 In the winter of 1686–7 the King eventually dismissed his brothers-in-law, the Protestant Earls of Clarendon and Rochester, after extensive efforts to secure the conversion of Rochester to Catholicism had failed and as time passed the government fell further under the control of Catholics at court, such as Father Petre and the Catholic sympathiser the Earl of Sunderland.
By the beginning of 1687 there were two clear aims to royal policy: first, to solidify the King’s developing alliance with dissenters and secondly to produce a Parliament that would pass the repeal of the Test Acts and penal laws. To achieve the second objective, James undertook an intensive programme of ‘closeting’ as many members of the Lords and Commons as he could, in order to ascertain how they stood on the subject of removing the laws. The Hydes had been the first and most prominent victims of this process and they were shortly followed into the political wilderness by Lord Maynard, controller of the Royal Household, and Lord Yarmouth, its treasurer. Others were promoted through royal patronage, such as the Catholic Lord Arundel, granted the Privy Seal, and the King’s bastard son James Fitzjames, created Duke of Berwick, Earl of Tinmouth and Baron Bosworth. Despite these changes, James’s royal household remained predominantly Protestant in make-up.20 Nonetheless, the interviews of some with the monarch gave them the impression that he might resort to extraordinary measures. Sir Thomas Dyke had told him that his conscience would not allow him to consent to the repeal of the tests or the penal laws, to which James replied that there was nothing of conscience in the question as he had promised to defend and maintain the Church of England ‘and so I will if they will gratifie me in this thinge, and trust to me; but otherwise, this beinge the only thinge they cann gratifie me in, I will take other courses’.21
The Glorious Revolution Page 9