Revolution

FAR FROM BEING A MAN FOR ARBITRARY POWER

Immediately upon the death of his brother on 6 February, James delivered an impromptu speech to his privy council in an attempt to reassure those at the centre of power they had nothing to fear from his accession. Deeply upset by his brother's demise and with tears still in his eyes, he resolutely promised that he would ‘preserve this Government both in Church and State as it now by Law Establish'd’. Far from being ‘a Man for Arbitrary Power’, he said, he knew ‘the Laws of England’ were ‘sufficient to make the King as Great a Monarch’ as he could wish, and although he would ‘never Depart from the just Rights and Prerogatives of the Crown’, he would likewise never ‘invade any man's Property’. The council realized the propaganda value of such royal assurances, and insisted that what James had said should immediately be written down and published.³ James later maintained that the published version of the speech was worded more strongly than he would have liked: it would have expressed his meaning better, he claimed, if it had read that ‘he never would endeavour to alter the established religion’, rather than that he would ‘preserve’ it, but he had been so busy when asked to approve the wording that he passed it over without reflection. This sounds like ex post facto special pleading. One contemporary alleged that James had in fact offered even fuller assurances in his original speech, promising to sacrifice ‘the last drop of [his] blood to maintain the Protestant religion’, and to follow his ‘late Brother's example’ as far as it lay within him. Whatever the truth, James was to be forever haunted by words he had uttered in the first few hours of his reign while still in a state of considerable emotional distress following the death of his brother.⁴

The official version of the speech was widely disseminated. It was published separately and printed in the official government newspaper, the London Gazette. The leading Tory journalist and Charles II's licenser of the press Roger L'Estrange reported the speech in his bi-weekly Observator, and remarked that here was as much of a security ‘as any Good Christian, or Subject’ could pray for.⁵ The Anglican clergy read it to their congregations. Benjamin Camfield rejoiced from his pulpit at Aylestone, near Leicester, at having a king who chose to begin his reign by emphasizing his concern for his people's ‘just Rights, Properties and Liberties’ and ‘that most excellent, pure, and Reformed Religion which is by Law Established’.⁶ The Archbishop of York, John Dolben, visited a number of communities in Yorkshire to ‘enlarge upon’ the King's declaration ‘to preserve the government of the Church and State as it is established by law’, which apparently made ‘noe small impressions upon the People of all Sorts’.⁷ Friends wrote to each other to check if they had ‘hard the grate asureance by the word of sow grate a monarch in promising to maintane the now Establisht government both in Church and State as now by Law Established’, as one correspondent put it.⁸ According to another letter writer, although people were upset at the news of Charles II's death, their sorrows were ‘much abated by the great assurances’ King James had given ‘to govern by the laws to maintain the Protestant Religion and to follow the steps of his worthy brother, as the best pattern’.⁹ And if anyone had still chanced to miss what the King had said, James was soon to reiterate his promises to protect the Established Church and the rights of his subjects at the openings of both the Scottish and English parliaments.

Arrangements were quickly made for proclaiming James king, and a proclamation was issued for the continuance in office of all those who held positions at the death of Charles II, in order to ensure that there was ‘noe disturbance among his Majesties Subjects’ and that ‘peace [might] be continued’.¹⁰ There was thus considerable continuity in the personnel of government. In England, James retained all his brother's judges, appointing them at royal pleasure according to the practice firmly established in the previous reign. He took on a strongly Tory judicial bench: Charles II himself had made eleven arbitrary removals since 1676 to ensure its loyalty.¹¹ There was some reconstruction of the ministry, but those who had been influential under Charles remained in office. James retained the earls of Sunderland and Middleton as Secretaries of State. He appointed his brother-in-law, the Earl of Rochester (the brother of James's first wife, Anne Hyde) Lord Treasurer, choosing to put the treasury into one man's hands, as he put it, so ‘That there might be nothing like a Common Wealth in his own Court’.¹² James made Rochester's older brother, the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Privy Seal, in place of the Marquis of Halifax, who replaced Rochester as Lord President of the council. Francis North, Baron Guilford, continued as Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal. In Scotland, James retained all existing officers of state, privy counsellors, magistrates and other office-holders. This left the Earl of Perth as Chancellor and his younger brother, John Drummond (soon to be Earl of Melfort), as Secretary of State for Scotland. At this time both were still Protestants, although they were not to remain so for much longer. The Duke of Queensberry remained in charge at the treasury. In Ireland, where Ormonde had been about to be recalled just prior to Charles's death, James chose to entrust the administration to two Protestant lords justices: Michael Boyle, Archbishop of Armagh, and the Earl of Granard.¹³

The coronation was set for 23 April, which did not leave much time for preparations but, according to the French ambassador, James believed that once crowned his title as king could not be disputed.¹⁴ It is also revealing that James started to touch for the King's Evil from the beginning of March, presumably in an attempt to offer confirmation to his new subjects that he was indeed the legitimate, divinely ordained monarch.¹⁵ He did not show any of these concerns with regard to Scotland, however, where he made no arrangements to be crowned. The omission is perhaps understandable. Ever since the Scottish Stewart dynasty had inherited the English crown in 1603, England had become their home and trips to Scotland regarded as luxuries which took the monarch away from the important task of running England. Thus Charles I, who came to the throne in 1625, was not crowned in Scotland until 1633. Charles II, who was declared king by the Scots following the execution of Charles I in 1649, was crowned in Scotland in 1651, but under circumstances that he would later regret – and even resent – having been forced as a condition of Scottish support to take the Covenant. The Scottish Succession Act of 1681, which declared that the succession passed immediately to the next-in-line upon the death of the reigning monarch, seemed to make clear that the actual coronation played no role in conferring legitimacy on the new king (something confirmed by the language used to proclaim James VII king in Scotland in 1685). Indeed, the Succession Act even appeared to obviate the need for a new king to take the coronation oath, which James also failed to do upon his succession. It did not seem a big issue at the time, though it was to become one four years later.¹⁶

The most immediate concern at the start of the new reign was over finance. The major contributions to government revenue came from customs and excise, but these had been granted to Charles II for life, with no provision for their continuation for a specified number of months under his successor. On 9 February, therefore, James issued a proclamation for continuing the collection of customs and tonnage and poundage, announcing at the same time that parliament would soon meet to settle a sufficient revenue on the crown. Something needed to be done, if only to regulate trade – to prevent the flooding of the market with cheap foreign goods and the ruin of those domestic merchants who had goods on their hands on which they had already paid the duties. Security was also an issue: without this revenue, it was said, James would not have been able to maintain the navy.¹⁷ The situation with regard to the excise tax was slightly more complicated. At the Restoration, part of the excise had been granted to Charles II for life, but some of it to the monarchy in perpetuity. In addition, there was a clause in the Excise Act of 1661 which allowed it to be farmed out for a period of three years, and it just so happened that the day before Charles died the commissioners of the treasury had made a new three-year contract for the farming of that part of the excise which was due to terminate on the death of the King. The judges, by a majority of eight to four, decided that the contract should be allowed to stand despite Charles's demise (though Evelyn tells us that those ‘esteem'd the best Lawyers’ were the four who voted against), and a proclamation was published on 14 February ordering the payment of the whole excise for that period of time. There was some opposition to the continued collection of customs and excise. Sir Richard Temple, a commissioner of the customs under Charles II, was promptly dismissed and his colleague Lord Cheyne suspended for making ‘some scruple of receiving the same’.¹⁸ Yet although the levying of these taxes without parliamentary approval was to become an issue at the Glorious Revolution, James in fact had little difficulty in collecting the revenues at the time.

Contemporaries noted an immediate change in the moral tone of the court upon James's accession. ‘In the last King's tyme’, the Scottish lawyer Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall wrote, ‘mirth, playes, buf-foonerie, etc. domineered, and was incouraged’; now, there was ‘litle to be seen but seriousness and businesse’, and the King was ‘grave’ and gave ‘much application to public affairs’. ‘The same intimation’, Fountainhall added ominously, also held in religion.¹⁹ James decided to make an open avowal of his Catholicism right at the beginning of his reign. The Sunday immediately following his brother's death, James publicly attended mass at the Queen's chapel at St James's, and the next week he started hearing mass at Whitehall. He would not break the laws of England when he was a mere subject, he said, but now he was king and ‘above the executive force of the law’ he would own his religion. He was not willing at this stage to grant similar freedoms to his co-religionists. When some Catholic peers petitioned him for the public use of a church, he turned them down, saying ‘they beguiled themselfes if they expected greater freedom from him then they enjoyed under his brother’. Nevertheless, by the end of March it was noted that ‘many Romish priests’ had arrived in England from overseas, and that ‘the papists appear[ed] more boldly then ever’. James also encouraged his ministers to accompany him in the formal procession to and from chapel at Easter. Rochester, a devout Anglican and head of the Church interest, said he would only do so if formally ordered; James respected his scruples and allowed his brother-in-law to retire to the country, but the other ministers complied.²⁰

THE CLIMATE OF OPINION AT JAMES'S ACCESSION

The new reign started more smoothly than had been expected. Rochester informed Ormonde on 10 February that ‘everything is calm and quiet to a wonder, so that what hath passed seems to be a dream’. Ormonde replied that things had passed ‘as quietly’ in Ireland as in England, while the Earl of Perth was soon confirming that in Scotland, too, all was quiet. As Fountainhall observed, if Charles II had died in 1679 or shortly thereafter, ‘his brother would not have found so easie accesse to the throne’.²¹

Manifesting Loyalism:
Demonstrations, Addresses and Elections

Indeed, James's accession was greeted with positive enthusiasm throughout his dominions. His public proclamation as king was received, one Anglican clergyman claimed, ‘with the universal joy, contentment and applause of all good people’.²² It was as if ‘the whole Nation’ were ‘upon a vice of Loyalty’, another said.²³ The London Gazette carried reports of James's proclamation before enthusiastic crowds in some seventy-one different locations in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland – ten more if we include the Channel Islands, the West Indies, the American colonies and Madras. Local sources confirm the official view. The people of Loughborough, which was not even mentioned by the Gazette, allegedly ‘exceeded all others in theyr zeal at Proclaming the king, sacrificing severall Hogsheads to his Majesties Health’. The sheriff of Northumberland reported that ‘noe County in England could proclaime him [James II] with more Acclamation of Joy nor express more intire resolutions to serve him with their lives and fortunes’.²⁴ Similar scenes occurred in Scotland: in Edinburgh, when Perth proclaimed James VII on 10 February, he was seconded by ‘an Universal Acclamation’ from a crowd supposedly totalling ‘more than 30,000 of all Ranks of people’, and by the afternoon ‘the Town was full of Bonfires’, while Aberdeen similarly saw ‘the greatest demonstrations of Joy’. So too did Dublin and several other places in Ireland; at Downpatrick, County Down, James was proclaimed to the ‘generall unanimous and chearful consent of all present’, which one observer estimated to be ‘no lesse than a 1000 persons at least’.²⁵

Care is needed in the interpretation of this evidence. The accounts in the Gazette should be regarded less as objective reporting than as an official attempt to ascribe a particular meaning to the events purportedly being described: pro-government propaganda, in other words, as much as straightforward ‘news’.²⁶ Moreover, the demonstrations were hardly spontaneous. The proclaiming of a new king was a highly formal occasion, involving all the important local dignitaries – lords, gentry, clergy, magistrates and civic officials – dressed in their official regalia. The local authorities typically provided alcoholic refreshment to put the local inhabitants in a festive mood. The corporation of Lyme Regis, for example, sent twenty-four bottles ‘to the towne Hall att the proclamation of the King’.²⁷ In many towns the public drinking fountains ran with wine.²⁸ In Dublin, Ormonde caused ‘several Hogsheads of Wine to be placed’ at the three places where James was proclaimed, ‘for any that pleased to drink’, and also caused ‘Bonfires to be made at Night’.²⁹ In Edinburgh, the council directive ordering celebrations on the accession of James VII warned that those who did not show the correct ‘expressions of loyalty and great joy’ would be regarded as disaffected to the government and punished accordingly.³⁰ Even then, Fountainhall thought that ‘peoples greiff was more then ther joy, having lost ther dearly beloved King’.³¹ One Irish diarist similarly alleged that there was ‘little joy’ in people's countenances when James was proclaimed in Dublin.³²

Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that those who helped orchestrate the celebrations of February 1685 were tapping into deeply felt and widespread loyalist sentiments. In addition to officially sponsored bonfires, local residents often built their own. At Lisburn, in County Antrim, Ireland, for example, there were apparently bonfires ‘at every house’ on the day James was proclaimed. If James's succession had not been generally welcomed, we might expect the huge crowds that gathered to hear him proclaimed to have caused some disturbance. Only in Ulster does there appear to have been any noticeable trouble. At Belfast, with its sizeable population of Scottish Presbyterians, a hostile crowd pulled down the proclamation, a gesture which seemed to displease only the town sheriff. A more minor incident happened at Downpatrick, when a man was arrested for speaking seditious words when James was proclaimed, although the offender later claimed to have been drunk.³³

There was further public rejoicing on 23 April, the day of James's English coronation. The coronation itself in London was a splendid affair, ‘the whole Solemnity being performed with great Order and Magnificence’, the Gazette tells us, ‘and with all the Expressions of an Universal Joy’, although the nonconformist London diarist Roger Morrice alleged that ‘above one halfe of the Nobillity made excuses for one reason or another and were absent’.³⁴ The Gazette also documented elaborate displays of public feasting and drinking, followed by bonfires, bells and fireworks in Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Nottingham, Prescot (in Lancashire), Saltash and Shrewsbury, while local records reveal that similar events took place elsewhere.³⁵ An elaborate ceremony took place at Lyme Regis in Dorset, which involved the procession of 300 virgins through the town pledging ‘their Majesties healths’, followed by fireworks and innumerable bonfires as the town conduits ‘ranne with wine’.³⁶ The English coronation was also commemorated in Scotland and Ireland.³⁷ Again, sponsorship from above can be detected, with town authorities or local churchwardens invariably providing money for alcohol and bonfires.³⁸ Yet it would be wrong to see the celebrating crowds as manipulated mobs. As with the demonstrations in February, what we see here are attempts by local political leaders to encourage local inhabitants publicly to demonstrate their allegiance to the new king and testify their support for the hereditary succession – testing, in the process, how deep-seated those sentiments were, but no doubt being delighted with their findings.

The impression of extensive popular support for James is strongly reinforced by the evidence of loyal addresses congratulating the King on his accession to the throne. The Gazette reported a total of 439 such addresses – 346 from England and Wales; 75 from Ireland; 5 from Scotland; and 13 from residents overseas or foreign dominions – from a wide variety of different groups: county leaders, grand juries, town magistrates, diocesan clergy, local inhabitants, loyal societies, merchants, apprentices and various trades. Some had large numbers of signatories. The address from the Cornish tin workers was purportedly signed by more than 12,000 hands; that from the gentry, chief inhabitants and freeholders of Norfolk by about 6,000 people.³⁹

Invariably the addressers expressed support for the hereditary succession and relief that Exclusion had failed. The mayor, aldermen, freemen and other inhabitants of Newark-upon-Trent, Nottinghamshire, for example, acknowledged James as ‘the most Rightful and Undoubted Heir and Successor’, and said it was ‘a great blessing of the Divine Providence, that in spight of all Democraticall Spirits, we still live under the best of Governments, Monarchy, wherein the Crowned Head is not determinable by plurality of Votes’ and that ‘a Bill of Exclusion’ could not ‘cut off Your Majesties Succession to that Inheritance’ to which he was entitled ‘by all Law Sacred and Civil’. The inhabitants of Deal in Kent rejoiced that the crown had descended to James, ‘notwithstanding the Votes of Exclusion, and the Endeavours of Factious, and unreasonable Men to the contrary’.⁴⁰

Various companies of merchants pledged their willingness to pay the customs tax, because of the need to maintain the navy both for the ‘defence of the Nation’ and ‘the security of Trade’, as the general trading merchants of London put it.⁴¹ Even companies that in the past had been ‘looked upon as fanatical’ were ‘as forward as the best’ in addressing the crown, because they recognized that ‘the necessity of trade’ required there be ‘no intermission of payments’.⁴² The barristers and students of Middle Temple argued that an intermission in the customs would have disastrous consequences for national security, and insisted that the common law allowed the monarch to act by his prerogative in such an emergency to secure ‘the Liberty and Property of the Subject’.⁴³ Beyond these, most of the addresses focused on James's assurances to protect the established government in Church and state. John Sharp, Dean of Norwich and rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields in London, drew up an address from the grand jury for the City of London, thanking the King for ‘the gracious assurances’ he had given his people ‘to maintain and support the government both in Church and State as established by Law’.⁴⁴ The gentry and other inhabitants of Anglesey in Wales stated that the King's resolution ‘to maintain the present Government by Law Established both in Church and State’ rendered them ‘the happiest Subjects in the World’. Most addressers were at pains to emphasize James's promise both ‘to defend and support the Established Church of England’ and ‘to preserve the Laws of this Realm’, to cite the address of the lords and gentry of the loyal society which met near Gray's Inn.⁴⁵

This is not to say that the addressers saw their support for the new Catholic king as conditional upon his willingness to rule according to law and to protect the Church. Anglicans – as several of the addresses pointed out – believed that their religion taught them unconditional loyalty. Thus the ‘Loyal Subjects’ of New Malton, Yorkshire, affirmed it ‘would be to Contradict the Principles of our Religion’ to ‘make our obedience Conditional’.⁴⁶ Many addressers also happily recognized that James's declaration to his council had included an assertion that he would never depart from the prerogatives of the crown. The corporation of Hereford thanked James for declaring he would ‘maintain [his] Prerogatives’ as well as ‘the present Government in Church and State’; the inhabitants of Rutland acknowledged the King's ‘Just Rights and Prerogatives’ to be the ‘best Security’ for their ‘Religion and Properties’; while those of Westminster proclaimed they would expose their ‘Lives and Fortunes’ in defence of the King's person ‘and of the Rights and Prerogatives of the Crown’. The address from the corporation of Monmouth acknowledged that it was the King's ‘Right to Rule and Govern’ and ‘Subjects’ Duty to Obey'.⁴⁷ Nevertheless, many of the addresses were intended to remind James that he had publicly pledged to protect the Church of England and that this was a promise he should not break. As the gentry of Cumberland put it: ‘it is the Royal Word of a Prince who hath always born the Character of being a strict and inviolable Observer of His Promise’. The Berkshire addressers said they built their confidence ‘as on a Rock’, because ‘the Truth’ of James's ‘Royal Word’ had ‘ever been as undoubted’ as his ‘Courage in the greatest dangers hath been undaunted’. The Canterbury addressers were grateful for the declaration, which proceeded ‘from so famous a Prince, who by a most Religious observance of his Royal Word both in Adversity and Prosperity’, they claimed, had ‘attained the Character of James the Just’.⁴⁸

However, these addresses cannot be read as straightforward evidence of public opinion. Many came from corporations or judicial benches that had been purged during the years of the Tory Reaction to ensure their loyalty. The corporation of Lyme Regis, for example, under new mayor George Alford, delivered a congratulatory address on James's peaceful accession in March; a few months later Lyme Regis was to be where the Duke of Monmouth was to start his rebellion to try to prevent James's accession from being anything but peaceful. We should not, though, put too much weight on the remodelling of the corporations. Despite Lyme Regis's reputation for radicalism, there had always been a significant loyalist presence in the town, and Alford had been active (and successful) in promoting loyal addresses in the early 1680s.⁴⁹ Berwick-upon-Tweed delivered two loyal addresses: one before and one after the quo warranto had come into effect.⁵⁰ There may have been a certain amount of fraud in ascribing signatories to an address. The Dean of Salisbury received a complaint that he had affixed the names of several clergy to an address he delivered in the name of his diocese; indeed, the Dean acknowledged that he had taken for granted the consent of some who were too far away to sign the address themselves, although he claimed he had presumed only ‘for the Loyal Clergy’ within his jurisdiction, namely those who had opposed Exclusion.⁵¹

Having said all this, many of the addresses seem to have been promoted by energetic and apparently sincere loyalists at the local level, who actively assumed the initiative themselves, without any prompting from government agents or those at the centre of power. The corporation of Leicester, for example, agreed to their own address before they received the proposed address sent to them by the Earl of Huntingdon, who had been created recorder of the borough during the years of the Tory Reaction.⁵² ‘The yong men and apprentices of the citty of Yorke’ were keen to ‘showe their loyaltie’ to the new king on his accession: they had already petitioned the governor of the castle, Sir John Reresby, for permission ‘to exercise themselves in arms some days in every year’, so that they could ‘gain experience to serve the King’, before handing him an address signed by 440 of their number ‘to present to the King as ther congratulation for his happy accession to the Crown’.⁵³ Indeed, initially some of the addressers were unsure as to whether their initiatives would be regarded as appropriate. As early as 9 February officials in Southampton were inquiring whether it would be proper for them to show their ‘duty to his Majestie in an humble and early Address’, and asked for advice.⁵⁴ On 26 February Ormonde's servant, Sir Christopher Wyche, waited on Lord Treasurer Rochester with an address from Trinity College Dublin, in order to find out ‘whether he conceived addresses of that kind from several parts of Ireland, after the example of England, would be acceptable to the King’. Rochester replied ‘that since addresses were now in fashion, if they were drawn with due prudence and modesty, he believed his Majesty would receive them with the same grace’ as those from England.⁵⁵

Although the addresses point to the extensiveness of loyalist sentiment at the time of James's accession, we should not necessarily conclude that there was a Tory-Anglican consensus in 1685, or that the Whigs had all but disappeared. Several of the addresses express concern about a residual Whig presence in the localities. The Cinque Ports promised that they would ‘not Elect or admit into any Office… any Persons that abetted or voted that diabolical and unjust Bill of Exclusion, designed to involve us in Blood, and destroy the Constitution of the antient Monarchy of your Majesties Kingdoms’. The address from Evesham, Worcestershire, expressed a hope that James's declaration would ‘charm those Seditious Spirits into a peaceable acquiescence’. The grand jury for the county of Essex stated that they hoped ‘the most Republick and Phanatick Spirits may be convinced that the Law of Heaven is never to be violated by an Exclusion Bill upon Earth’, and that the King's declaration would ‘oblige the worst of Men to repent of their former Mistakes’.⁵⁶ Those addresses delivered during the parliamentary elections that spring often gave assurances that the signatories would do their utmost to secure the return of MPs who would be loyal to the crown, implying that there were still potential candidates, with local support, who might not be so loyal. The corporation and ‘other inhabitants’ of Scarborough on the East Yorkshire coast promised the King that they would do their best to ensure that the ‘Imprudent Promoters of the Bill of Exclusion’ would ‘for ever be excluded your Majesties great Council of Parliament’. The ‘Truly Loyal Inhabitants’ of Poole, Dorset, stated that they were aware ‘of that Odium this Corporation Labours under through the Malevolent Influence of some few disaffected Persons’, but promised to endeavour to return to parliament members who would ‘readily concur and comply with whatsoever shall be offered for better settling the Revenues on the Crown’.⁵⁷ The ‘Loyal Subjects’ of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, who claimed to be ‘the principal and major part of the inhabitants’, admitted that their town ‘hath lain under the unhappy Character of Phanaticism’, though alleged this was because of ‘the Irreclaimable Tempers and Spirits of Persons of the Inferior Rank only’ who had been encouraged in their disaffection by their former MPs. The ‘Loyal Subjects’ had now, however, secured the election of two new men – both Tories – and they therefore implored the King ‘to distinguish us from the said Disaffected Persons’.⁵⁸ The corporation of Kingston upon Hull promised James they would choose as MPs men who were ‘truly Loyal and Cordial Lovers of Your royal Person and Government, and Abhorrers of the late Votes for Exclusion’, assuring him that those who had signed the address were ‘much the greater number’ of those who had the right to vote in parliamentary elections.⁵⁹

The Scottish and Irish addresses were broadly similar to those from England, though with their own local coloration. The royal burghs of Scotland stated that they acknowledged James enjoyed his right to the crown ‘by the unalterable Laws’ of his ‘ancient Kingdom’, and that he held ‘the same immediately from God Almighty alone’ (language which echoed that of the Scottish Succession Act of 1681). Edinburgh's address recalled ‘the joyful Acclamations with which the news’ of James's accession had been received in the Scottish capital and how James, during his stint as head of the government in Scotland, had managed ‘to overcome all these desperate Designs which tend to make us Atheists under the pretence of Religion, and Slaves under the pretext of Liberty’. Glasgow's magistrates recorded not only their joy at James's succession but also their optimism that under his rule Scotland would ‘be again reduced to Quiet and Happiness’.⁶⁰ The corporation of Dublin blessed God for James's ‘accession to the imperiall crownes of these your kingdomes’, promising to ‘obey and serve’ their ‘true and… lawfull sovereign’ with their ‘lives and fortunes’, although they pointedly added that they also thanked James for his ‘gratious expressions at [his] first sitting in councill’. Waterford rejoiced at James's ‘quiet and peaceable possessing’ of his ‘lawful and hereditary throne’, beseeched God that both James and his ‘rightfull heires’ might ‘long reign over us’, and thanked the King for his promise to protect them ‘in the injoyment of those things that are most dear unto us’. The members of Trim corporation not only pledged their ‘lives and fortunes’ in the defence of James's ‘person, prerogative, and government’ but also offered their ‘hartie thanks for the gratious assurances’ the new king had been pleased to give them ‘of Maintaining the government as by law Established in Church and State’.⁶¹ The Protestant clergy of Ireland sent in addresses thanking James for his promise to protect the Church of England, although according to a retrospective account by the Protestant clergyman William King, they were soon told by the Roman Catholics, ‘that his Majesty did not intend to include Ireland in that Declaration’, which was to ‘be a Catholick Kingdom’.⁶² The Catholic clergy of Ireland certainly had cause to be optimistic: when they sent in their own congratulatory letters, James replied by assuring them that he would continue to give them his ‘royall protection and favour… upon all occasions’.⁶³

The acid test of the extent to which the Whig threat had been contained would be the parliamentary elections in England that spring. (In Scotland, the electorate was small and largely under the patronage of the nobility and merchants; in Ireland there was to be no parliament called in 1685.) From the government's point of view, the results could not have been much better. An overwhelmingly Tory-Anglican House of Commons was returned, with a mere 57 of the 513 seats going to known Whigs.⁶⁴ How had this been achieved?

Government management provides part of the answer. Contemporaries noted the ‘greate industry’ that was used to ‘promote the Courte Interest’: ‘all possible Intrigues, and Closetings’ were ‘made use of, to elect such Persons as would comply with the King's designs’, while letters were written from court ‘to a great many Counties, and Corporations… with downright Insinuations that their not compliance herein, would be looked upon by the King, as dissatisfaction to the Government’.⁶⁵ The Earl of Sunderland, as Secretary of State, wrote to several constituencies advising them whom the King would like to see elected. Other privy counsellors and the Lord Lieutenants were also active on behalf of the crown.⁶⁶

The quo warranto proceedings against the borough corporations of Charles II's last years – which had led to many corporations being forced to surrender their old charters in return for new ones which gave the crown greater control over the composition of local town councils – had certainly had a beneficial electoral effect, helping to create safe seats for the government where the corporation controlled the franchise. At St Albans, for example, only the freemen created by the mayor and aldermen under the new charter were allowed to vote, which reduced the electorate from about 600 to less than 100, one half of whom were non-residents. As a result, the two Whigs who had been returned in 1679 and 1681 were ousted in 1685.⁶⁷ Perhaps the most significant impact of the purges of both town and county government carried out towards the end of Charles II's reign, however, was to put Tories in a position of strength from which they could best manage the elections to their advantage. Electoral malpractice was rampant. The contemporary diarist Narcissus Luttrell recalled how ‘great tricks and practices were used… to keep out all those they call whiggs or trimmers’, such as holding the poll secretly, at night, with no publicity; adjourning the poll from place to place, ‘to weary the freeholders’, and refusing ‘to take the votes of excommunicate persons and other dissenters’.⁶⁸ At St Albans, to return to our earlier example, Whig canvassers were threatened with prosecution, and innkeepers with the dragooning of troops or the loss of their licences if they provided hospitality for Whig voters.⁶⁹ At Leicester, the Whig Sir Edward Abney intended to contest one of the seats and was said to have had numerous committed supporters; he was outmanoeuvred, however, being informed that the election was to take place on Monday 16 March only to discover, too late, that it had been held the Friday before.⁷⁰ In Derbyshire, the Whig candidate, William Sacheverell, was shut out of the poll by the Tory sheriff, on the grounds that he was not resident in the county when the election writs were sent out, even though Sacheverell could claim ‘Custome to the Contrary’.⁷¹ A riot ensued at the Cheshire elections when the Tory sheriff, after first having polled the Tory voters, decided to shut up shop early before he had counted all the Whig voters, thereby manufacturing a Tory victory. Angry crowds of Whig supporters and dissenters broke the windows of the houses of local loyalists, shouting ‘Down with the clergy, down with the bishops’; the local Tories celebrated, in turn, at a huge bonfire where they burnt the Bill of Exclusion.⁷²

Yet Tory success at the polls in 1685 also reflected the shift in public opinion that had occurred since the Whig-dominated parliaments of 1679–81. As L'Estrange recorded in his Observator, it became ‘the Common Out-cry at All Elections; No Excluders! No Excluders!’⁷³ At the Nottinghamshire election, held at Newark on 23 March, for example, a party of electors paraded a banner bearing the words ‘No Black Box, No Bill of Exclusion, No Association’, which they subsequently burnt at a bonfire in the market place, while there was a similar anti-Whig ritual at a public bonfire at Newcastle under Lyme on 1 April, sponsored by the mayor.⁷⁴ (The ‘Black Box’ referred to the box which the Whigs of the Exclusion Crisis claimed carried the marriage certificate of Charles II and Lucy Walter, thus proving Monmouth was legitimate; the Association was a reference to Shaftesbury's alleged plan in 1681 to form an association of Protestants to protect against the advent of a Catholic successor.⁷⁵) The Tories did well not only in the smaller borough constituencies (where they won 86 per cent of the seats compared to only 50 per cent in 1681), but also in the larger boroughs and the counties (where they won over 90 per cent of the seats, compared to about 25 per cent in 1681). Whereas the Whigs had held between two-thirds and three-quarters of the ninety-two county seats in England and Wales after the elections to both the second and third Exclusion Parliaments, after the 1685 elections they held on to less than one tenth (just eight county seats). Nevertheless, although the Whig position had been seriously weakened and their public support eroded, we should not conclude that Whiggism was all but dead or that, with the exception of a few hardliners, most of those who had supported the Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis had now turned Tory. Some 72 constituencies saw electoral contests in 1685, compared to just 54 in 1681 and 79 in the second general election of 1679; and even in some of those seats that did not go to the polls, there were Whig challenges to the ‘selection’ of two Tories.⁷⁶

Preaching Loyalism:
The Protestant Clergy and their Catholic King

Further insight into the nature of the loyalist position at this time can be gained by looking at the sermons delivered by the Anglican clergy during the first few months of the reign. These tended to stress divine right and non-resistance, themes that had been heard time and time again during the Exclusion Crisis and Tory Reaction. For example, in a sermon delivered on the first Sunday following James's accession (8 February), Erasmus Warren, rector of Worlington, Suffolk, reminded his congregation that kings were ‘Gods upon Earth’ who derived their authority from ‘God alone’, and ‘Not at all from his Subjects’: ‘Elect him they cannot; Confirm him they need not; Depose him they may not.’ Subjects, Warren claimed, were under an obligation to obey their king and the ‘wholesom Laws’ made by ‘rightful Legislators’. He did insist that one should not obey the king's laws if they were impious; ‘Yet in this case,’ he continued, there was ‘not the least resistance to be made upon any terms’, beyond ‘Holy Prayers and Tears’. ‘If the rightful King… should strein the Government’, ‘loosen our Laws’ and ‘lay most heavy burdens upon us,’ Warren concluded, ‘we must stand under them couragiously… till Providence is pleas'd to alleviate or remove them; though they be so ponderous as to crush us to Death.’⁷⁷ John Curtois, rector of Branston, Lincolnshire, took as his text that day Romans 13, v.1, ‘The Powers that be are ordained of God’ – St Paul's classic injunction against resistance – in order to emphasize that all kings were ‘to be Obeyed’ (as the subtitle of the printed version of his sermon put it). Curtois did allow for passive obedience: ‘The Commands of a King,’ he said, were ‘obligatory to every Subject except where they contradict the Commands of God; and then the Subject may lawfully deny the performance of them.’ Nevertheless, treason and rebellion were out of the question and were ‘punishable both in this and the next World’. In the process, Curtois articulated what was in essence a defence of royal absolutism. ‘The King is not subject to the Coercive Power of the Law,’ he insisted. ‘There is no Law made but with His Royal Assent: And when the Law is in force it can have no power over him, because the Authority it hath, it receiveth from him both as to the Being and Execution of it.’ Although it was true, he went on, that the king, at his coronation, took ‘an Oath before the People to govern by the Law’, this did not mean that the king was ‘Coordinate with or inferiour to the people or the Law, because it giveth him no Right or Title to the Government’: his ‘Right and title’ were ‘Antecedent’, and both ‘the Crowning and Proclamation of him’ were ‘onely Publick Declarations that he is by Birth-Right in Lawfull Possession of it’.⁷⁸ Similar principles were articulated by clergy of the Established Church in Scotland and Ireland.⁷⁹

It is significant to note, however, that despite preaching obedience to the Catholic king, many of these loyalist sermons employed the rhetoric of anti-popery to make an attack on their political and religious opponents. Curtois, for example, reminded his audience that under the terms of the royal supremacy, the Church was subject to the king: ‘upon this principle our Reformation from all the other Popish corruptions was founded’. It therefore followed that ‘the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Quakers’, and other Protestant sects who denied the royal supremacy, were ‘not to be accounted of our Church’, but were ‘Retainers still to the Church of Rome, being not yet reform'd from this Romish corruption, of subjecting the King to the Church’.⁸⁰ The Scottish Episcopalian minister James Canaries, preaching at Selkirk on 29 May, at the time of Argyll's rebellion, insisted that no justification could be found in scripture for taking up arms ‘to resist the Supream Authority’, and argued that this doctrine came to Scotland from Rome via Calvin's Geneva, concluding that although ‘our Rebels and Fanaticks’ made ‘such a clutter upon pretence of keeping out Popery’, they were in fact ‘as great Papists them-selves, and sure as dangerous too, as those whom they are so eager against’. ⁸¹

Furthermore, the Anglican clergy's support for the King was never totally unqualified. Many of the loyalist sermons combined a championship of royal authority with a defence of the rule of law. In this respect, a sermon on The Doctrine of Passive Obedience by James Ellesby, vicar of Chiswick, is revealing. It was delivered on 30 January 1685 but published shortly after James's accession, to justify ‘the Principles of Subjection’ to the new king. Ellesby was explicit in stating that the king was absolute. By king, he said, ‘we are to understand a Sovereign Prince, one invested with the Supream Power of a Nation’, ‘one who is acknowledged Sovereign in his Kingdoms’, and who has ‘no Equal, much less Superiour upon Earth’. ‘Such a one as this,’ he continued, the laws affirm to be ‘Legibus Solutus, free from the Coercive Power of the Law.’ Yet in his preface Ellesby insisted that the intent of his sermon was ‘not to flatter Princes into an Abuse of their Power, or make them more Absolute than the Law hath done (a Calumny, which some are apt to fasten on the Doctrine of Passive Obedience;) but to teach Subjects their Duty to Governours’. Such things did not vary with the times, hence why his sermon was equally appropriate under James II as it had been under Charles II, especially since James had promised to govern and continue things as now settled and established by law. In the text of his sermon, Ellesby confirmed that people might ‘endeavour the Security and Preservation’ of their ‘Liberties and Estates by all Lawful means, in a Legal Way, and after a Modest, Humble, and Peaceable Manner’, as was consistent with ‘the Laws of the Land’ and ‘that Duty and Respect, which by the Law of God we owe our Prince’.⁸²

When Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, delivered the coronation sermon on 23 April, he did not tell James that he could take his subjects' obedience for granted as their divinely ordained ruler. Rather, he implied the need to cultivate their support. ‘We have a King who understands,’ he claimed, ‘that in an Hereditary Monarchy, 'tis the great peculiar advantage of the Prince as well as People, that their Interest is one and the same, their Happiness so closely united.’ At this juncture, Turner chose to assure those present that James was ‘the Sharer of his Royal Brother's Cares’, someone who could be expected to practise ‘Justice with Equity’ and govern ‘according to Law’; Turner naturally did not stop to consider what the situation would be should the people become unhappy because the King chose not to govern according to law.⁸³ Canaries, preaching at Selkirk in late May, went somewhat over the top in heaping praise upon James, whom (if anything) he thought was better than the great Charles II. Yet his praise for James was linked to the promise the Catholic king had made ‘to defend and protect our Religion as established by Law, and all our Rights and Properties’, and he was at great pains to emphasize that all the world knew that James was a man who adhered to his word.⁸⁴

One of the most revealing sermons is that delivered by Dr William Sherlock, Master of the Temple and a royal chaplain, before the Commons on 29 May, the anniversary of the Restoration. When asking whether the Church of England was in danger from the Catholic King, Sherlock insisted that ‘next to having our King of the Communion of the Church of England’, we could ‘desire no more, than to have a King, who will defend it’, referring to ‘those solemn and repeated assurances’ that James had ‘given us of this Matter’. Although Sherlock urged loyalty, he also said that ‘Loyalty and Obedience’ were ‘a powerful Obligation on Princes to rule well’. He even seemed to imply that the King would endanger his throne should he be rash enough to upset his subjects by failing to protect the Established Church:

for Princes must value Obedience and Subjection as they do their Crowns. To this we owe the present Security and Protection of the Church of England; for if there were nothing else to be liked in it, yet a generous Prince cannot but like and reward its Loyalty; and it would seem very harsh for any Prince to desire that Religion should be turned out of the Church, which secures him in a quiet possession of his Throne.

Sherlock therefore urged the assembled MPs to ‘a Church of England-Loyalty’. To be ‘true to our Prince’, he insisted, ‘we must be true to our Church and to our Religion’; it would be ‘no Act of Loyalty to accommodate or complement away our Religion and its legal Securities’, since ‘if we change our Religion, we must change the Principles of our Loyalty too, and I am sure the King and the Crown will gain nothing by that’. Although Sherlock defended the Catholic King, he nevertheless attacked Roman Catholics, on the ground that they did not profess the same principles of loyalty as did members of the Established Church: some papists ‘in some Junctures of Affairs, may have been very Loyal’, but ‘the Popish Religion is not’, since, he said, ‘it teaches them to rebel’.⁸⁵

The evidence of sermons preached by the clergy of the Established Church (in all three kingdoms) seems to confirm the picture presented by the loyal addresses: many of those who welcomed James's accession in 1685 did so in the belief that the new king would uphold the rule of law and protect the existing Protestant establishment in the Church. After all, James had promised that he would do both, and he was reputed to be a man of his word. At the time, Protestants of the Established Church would not have seen their loyalty as conditional, since they expected that James would indeed keep his word. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that most of those who championed James II in 1685 adhered to what Sherlock had styled ‘a Church of England-loyalty’; it was not quite the unconditional loyalty which James II himself took it to be.

Manifesting Disloyalty:
Seditious Rhymes and Treasonous Words

Not everyone welcomed James's accession. Isolated murmurings of discontent can be detected in the early months of the new reign. A seditious rhyme found by a carver's apprentice affixed to the gate of a merchant's house in Deal, Kent, just four days after the accession of the Catholic monarch, asked: ‘O Ingland will thow sitt still and see thy neck put in a yoke’?

Thow may remember quene Mary promisde fair
before she the crowne did weare
But when she the crowne she had poscest
she never did let the prodistants rest
From place to place she maid them fly
like birds which dow mount up into the skey
What a dreadful sight it was to behold and see
how poor prodistants lay burning by twos and thres
All thous who would not popish turne
must go to the stake and thear burne.86

In Leicester, shortly after James's accession, a ‘most hellish damnable treasonable paper against his sacred Majestie’ was delivered to the town mayor, suspected to have been written by local buttonmaker John Broadhurst.⁸⁷ At about the same time, a woollendraper from Lewes, East Sussex, allegedly expressed his belief ‘That every good Protestant or good Christian would be for the Bill of Exclusion’.⁸⁸ At the beginning of March the government learned of a seditious paper doing the rounds in Barking, Essex, on the main road into London, which asserted that although the council had declared James ‘England's Lawfull King’ this was ‘not by the Consent of the nation Esembled in parliament and tharfore noe waise binding upon the people to looke upon him as realley sutch’. Indeed, the paper continued, his ‘Virtuses’ no man knew, but his ‘Vices’ were ‘vary publick and unumerable’, including the ‘Burning of London’ (the Great Fire of London of 1666 had been blamed on Catholics and James was later suspected of complicity himself), ‘Murdaring of Justis Godfrey’ (the Middlesex JP found dead in mysterious circumstances after taking depositions relating to the Popish Plot in 1678) and ‘Grate Essex’ (the Rye House plotter who had allegedly committed suicide in jail in 1683), and ‘Poisning his Brothar to come to the Crowne’.⁸⁹

Some quickly became anxious about what it might mean to have a Catholic monarch. A man from Charing in Kent was ordered to be fined, pilloried and whipped for repeating a ‘report’ he had heard in London shortly after James's accession that ‘the King would govern by a Standing Army’.⁹⁰ One correspondent reported from London that when the King and Queen heard mass at their private chapel in Whitehall on Sunday 15 February, it gave ‘great dissatisfaction to all’, ‘the great Tories as well as the Whigs’, so that ‘one could almost believe that they are United’.⁹¹ Thomas Smith, a labourer from Billingsgate, was convicted of having said in March that ‘The King of England is a knowne papist, And hee hath forfeited the Kingdome… And he ought not to inherit the Crowne.’⁹² From Tower Hill in the east of London it was reported in mid-April that ‘many ordinary people’ were ‘secured for dangerous words, and all meanes… underhand used by the disaffected to distemper the rabble’.⁹³ That same month, Londoner Christopher Smitten was found guilty of saying that ‘The Catholickes are as liable to be punished as any other Dissenter, And God blesse his Majestie, Hee is as liable to be punished as any other person’.⁹⁴ In June, Katherine Hall, the wife of a London malt factor, was accused by her servant, Thomas Tothall, of saying that ‘the late King was a blacke bastard and that the Duke of Yorke his present Majestie was a duke of Devills’.⁹⁵ Concern about the King's Catholicism led some two to three hundred inhabitants of Portsmouth to stage a pope-burning procession on 1 May.⁹⁶ Others had a distaste for the exalting of royal authority by the Anglican clergy. John Curtois encountered some opposition when he preached his sermon vaunting the powers of the crown at Lincoln Cathedral; though it was kindly received ‘by many Loyal persons’, Curtois said, ‘there were a few Heterogeneous men crept in among them that were as much disgusted at it’.⁹⁷

Quite a few people expressed their support for Monmouth's pretensions to the crown, even before there was any inkling that the Protestant duke might attempt to launch a rebellion. The day after Charles II's death, Londoner John Payne (or Paine) was charged with having greeted the news of James's accession by saying ‘God blesse the Duke of Monmouth’, ‘the Duke of Monmouth shall be King for all this’ and ‘in spight of their hearts’. Payne was subsequently found guilty, fined, and condemned to stand in the pillory.⁹⁸ In mid-February, Secretary of State Sunderland received a report from the mayor of Chichester of a rumour spreading through the south-coast town ‘that the Duke of Monmouth was proclaimed King in Scotland’; the source, apparently, was a shoemaker's wife named Anne Warnett, who pleaded ignorance and claimed ‘she heard it from some persons walking in the street… who were strangers to her’.⁹⁹ A few days later Sunderland learned how ‘the phanatique party’ in the north were talking of ‘a great moore beyond York where… two dukes shall fight for the Crowne of England’ – meaning York and Monmouth – and that ‘In this battle the Duke of Yorke shall be slain, and the Crown party totally routed’.¹⁰⁰ Towards the end of February, a Yorkshireman lamented the fact that ‘Wee have a King but he is uncrown'd, for the Crowne belongs to the Duke of Monmouth’.¹⁰¹ In early March, Deborah Hawkins, from Holborn, London, told a female acquaintance that there was ‘noe King but an Elective King, and if there were Warrs', as she believed there would be, she would ‘put on breeches… to fight for the Duke of Monmouth’.¹⁰² In mid-March, Dr Benjamin Carr (or Care), from Storrington, Sussex, confronted a drinking companion with the words: ‘you are always drinking the King's health but if Monmouth had been King Then wee had had a brave Kingdome indeed’.¹⁰³ The following month a man was found guilty of treason for saying that he thought ‘the Duke of Monmouth was righteous King’.¹⁰⁴ On 23 April (Coronation day), Edward Apps of Broadwater, Sussex, reported how he had been told ‘that the Duke of Monmouth had sent to the Officers that were about Chichester to Aid and Assist him at the Sound of a Trumpet and beate of a Drum’.¹⁰⁵

Although talking through the examples in this manner might give the impression of a groundswell of popular discontent, it is difficult to get a measure from isolated reported cases of treasonous words or seditious rumour of how extensive popular disaffection might have been. All we can do is set this evidence in the balance against that of the numerous loyal addresses and demonstrations and the tremendous success of the Tories at the polls discussed earlier. There certainly was discontent, and there certainly were seditious grumblings (in various parts of the country) that were enough to give a jittery government cause for concern. But the overall impression left is that the openly disaffected were an isolated minority who were out-of-tune with the general drift of public opinion, even in London where opposition to the popish succession had been so intense at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. When Titus Oates, the Popish Plot informer, was sentenced to stand in the pillory on two occasions in different parts of London in May 1685, we have accounts of huge crowds pelting him with eggs and crying out ‘cutt off his ears’ and ‘hanging's too good for him!’ It was only after Oates had left the pillory on the second occasion that a small group of sympathizers turned up and broke the pillory to pieces.¹⁰⁶ In Scotland, there continued to be some rumblings in the south-west, where the fanatics were reported to be ‘very insolent, especially against the Ministers’.¹⁰⁷ The Episcopalian minister of Irongray, Dumfriesshire, was violently assaulted and ‘left for dead’ by some local Presbyterians ‘for prayeing for the King’; in the eyes of the assailants, both the King and the loyal clergyman were ‘papist dogs’. Although obliged by law to protect their minister from such assaults, the heritors (landowners and householders) of the parish made no attempt to pursue the rioters and were duly fined for their negligence.¹⁰⁸ Outside the south-west, however, things seemed relatively calm. The government, it should be said, was concerned about the potential for unrest in the Highlands, either from ‘Rebels within the country, or Argyle, landing with forces from abroad’, and therefore issued an order for the demolition of nine forts, castles or fortified houses belonging to the Earl in his ancestral lands, because garrisoning the area would be too expensive.¹⁰⁹ Against this, as we have seen, there is evidence of enthusiastic support for James's accession in the eastern lowlands, from Aberdeen down to Edinburgh, and not just amongst the political and clerical elite, but also amongst the masses. Likewise, in Ireland, there was little sign of disaffection, right at the beginning of the reign, outside Ulster.

The Reign of James II and VII, 1685–8

1

The Accession of the True and Lawful Heir