Revolution

During the Exclusion Crisis, Whig polemicists had painted a graphic and gruesome picture of what English Protestants could expect should a Catholic come to the English throne: brutal religious persecution; rule by a standing army; high taxes; the demise of parliament; and subjection to the power of France. However, the nightmare of exclusionist propagandists' imagination never materialized. Not only were there no Marian-style persecutions, but James II turned out to be the most religiously tolerant English monarch since the Reformation. Indeed, it is possible to put a fairly favourable gloss on what James tried to achieve in England. He did not make England subservient to the French, but sought to maintain a studied neutrality and keep England out of war. Trade prospered thanks to peace and toleration, and England consequently enjoyed a period of relative prosperity and low taxation. James's desire to allow his co-religionists to

hold office under the crown can be represented as perfectly understandable: why should he not seek the advice and support of those he trusted? Besides, Catholics were such a small proportion of the population that it can scarcely be said that they posed a significant threat to the Protestant establishment in Church and state. Moreover, James's legal experts assured him that in his efforts to help his fellow Catholics, he was technically acting within his legal powers. These are all arguments found in the Jacobite Life of James II, a retrospective history that makes extensive use of James's own papers and memoirs,¹ but echoes of them can be found – with varying degrees of refinement and modification – in the writings of modern scholars, who have rightly sought to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of James's reign and free us from the preconceptions and biases of Whig mythology.²

In many respects, however, it seemed to most of James's Protestant subjects that the worst predictions of the Exclusionists had come to pass. True, there were no Smithfield fires – no burnings of Protestant ‘martyrs’ at the stake – as there had been under England's last Catholic ruler, Mary Tudor (r. 1553–8). But there was to be no further meeting of parliament in England after the prorogation of November 1685, and when James did begin to make plans for calling a parliament again in 1688 his efforts to pack it were so blatant that it was clear to all that it would not be a free assembly. James kept a standing army, in peacetime, that was much larger than had been seen in England before. He also broke the Anglican monopoly of worship, education and office-holding, and he did so by setting his prerogative above the law, through the use of the dispensing and suspending powers. He even erected an Ecclesiastical Commission to discipline recalcitrant Protestant clergymen.

The purpose of this chapter, then, is to explore what James set out to achieve in England, the extent to which he acted in violation of the law, and how his English subjects responded. We shall see that in his efforts to help Catholics, James undoubtedly did exceed his legal powers. In the process, he managed to alienate broad cross-sections of the population: clerical and lay; upper, middling and lower sorts in both town and countryside; those at the centre of power and those remote from it. Most significantly, James succeeded in alienating the

Tory-Anglican interest, which had backed the crown so wholeheartedly during the final years of his brother's reign but which now proved determined to uphold the rule of law against what they perceived to be the illegal actions of an arbitrary monarch.

THE BRITISH AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXTS

The reaction to James's policies in England was conditioned, in part, by what English people perceived to be going on in his two other kingdoms. Contemporary diarists and newsletter writers traced developments in Scotland and Ireland with alarm. So too did pamphleteers. What the King could do in one kingdom he might well attempt in another. Gilbert Burnet, we have already noted, insisted that the Scottish Indulgence of February 1687 was but a prelude for what could be expected in England. As we shall see, he was right. Elsewhere, Burnet pointed to the fact that papists ‘in the Metropolitan City of the neighbouring Kingdom’ (i.e. Dublin) had been allowed ‘to usurp the publick Churches and Cathedrals’; here Burnet made no claim about the King's intent for England, but the warning was there for all to see.³ The Earl of Tyrconnell soon emerged as the bogeyman of popular imagination, whose desire to help his co-religionists in Ireland was seen as indicative of a larger design to take England, too, back to Rome. For example, when Tyrconnell visited a family tomb on the outskirts of Chester, in the latter part of 1685, it was said that he criticized how the church had been allowed to decay since the Reformation and warned that the Catholic would ‘have it shortly again’.⁴ When Lord Spencer saw a Punch and Judy show at Bartholomew Fair in London in August 1687, he thought the figure of Punch so resembled Tyrconnell that he drew his sword and cut off Punch's head, proclaiming to the crowd of spectators that he did this ‘that he might deliver the poore Kingdom of Ireland out of slavery’.⁵ Even Catholic apologists for James II believed that what was intended for England could be gleaned from royal initiatives pursued in Scotland and Ireland, and that James should come clean about this. Thus one manuscript tract of November 1686, suggesting various ways of protecting the Catholic interest in England, acknowledged that it was now ‘the Generall Opinion of the Nation, that his Majesty Intends to Introduce the Catholick Religion into all his Dominions’, and it was ‘labour in Vaine’ to try to deny it, especially with ‘the things that have been done in Scotland and Ireland seeming to tend to that purpose’.⁶

Public anxieties over James's domestic policies were also affected by the international context, and especially the growing threat of Louis XIV in France, whose aggressive, expansionist foreign policy seemed to threaten the balance of power in Europe generally and the Protestant interest in particular. James, to be fair, was not the French puppet of Whig legend. He sought to adopt a middle position in his foreign policy between the French and the Dutch interests so as to avoid dragging England into an expensive war, not least because he did not want to be forced by a foreign crisis into having to recall parliament. He did, it is true, take regular subsidies from the French king. Yet at the same time he was far from approving of Louis XIV's policies of aggression in western Europe, which hit at Catholic powers as well as Protestant; he renewed existing treaties with the Dutch upon his accession; he tried to get Louis to recognize William of Orange's rights to the Principality of Orange, which the French had annexed in 1672; and he stood up to Louis in North America.⁷

Nevertheless, there was widespread suspicion in England that James was in cahoots with the French king. Already by June 1685 there was a report going around of the English having entered ‘into a new alliance with France’, while the contemporary diarists Narcissus Luttrell and Roger Morrice carried similar reports of an Anglo-French concord in the spring of 1686, supposedly for a naval campaign against the Dutch.⁸ Moreover, James's accession to the English throne coincided with Louis XIV's intensification of the persecution of the Huguenots in France, culminating in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685, which formally rescinded Henry IV's edict of toleration of 1598. In mid-October Morrice recorded how the persecution in France was ‘far more cruell’ than previously reported or believed: great numbers of Huguenots had been kept without meat and sleep until they became distracted, and then forced to go to mass; others had been ‘hung up by their toes and hands and fingers, and other tender parts’, or else ‘had their Noses and lips slit’. Further French edicts issued in 1686 ordered Huguenot ministers to leave the kingdom upon pain of death; those who helped or harboured them were to be condemned to the galleys forever (or to the cloisters, if female) and have their goods confiscated. In November, Morrice learned how two Huguenot ministers had had ‘their hands first cutt off and then sewed on again, and after that fires were kindled round them… so they were in tract of time broiled or roasted to death’.⁹ The sense of alarm was further intensified when in the spring of 1686, the Duke of Savoy (a client of Louis XIV) invaded Piedmont and, together with his French allies, massacred some eight to ten thousand Protestants (the vast majority women, children and old people), selling into slavery those who managed to escape with their lives.¹⁰

Although James ordered collections of aid to be made for those Huguenots who fled to England, many doubted whether he was truly concerned about their plight. Indeed, the French ambassador, Barillon, claimed that James spoke of Louis XIV's attempts to extirpate heresy in France ‘as a thing that gave him great pleasure’, although of course we should not take what James chose to say to please the French ambassador as necessarily indicative of his true sentiments.¹¹ Tellingly, before James allowed the charity brief for the French Protestants of March 1686 to pass the great seal, he had the preamble changed to omit a passage that had referred to the Huguenots as suffering a ‘cruell persecution’.¹² When Barillon complained about the ‘scandalous Reflections’ upon Louis XIV in a French account of the sufferings of the Huguenots that was circulating in England in translation, James had the printer and translator arrested and ordered the book to be burnt by the common hangman – a provocative public gesture that must have made James's Protestant subjects wonder where his true sympathies lay.¹³ In June 1686 one newsletter carried an account of how James's privy council had proposed issuing quo warranto proceedings against the Huguenot church in London and other parts of England that did not conform to the ceremony of the Anglican Church, so that he could rid the kingdom of the French Protestants.¹⁴ In fact, James almost certainly did not approve of the violent persecution of the Huguenots in France. Nevertheless he was suspicious of the Huguenots, believing they were all at heart republicans, and had no genuine desire to welcome them into England; any efforts he undertook to help them were grudging and done mainly to placate English public opinion.¹⁵

DOMESTIC DANGERS

To Englishmen and women, looking at the international situation and developments in the two other Stuart kingdoms, the portents were not encouraging. The threat of popery and arbitrary government appeared a frightening reality. Worse still, there were signs that England was becoming a victim too. There was a series of concerns: James's expansion of the army, his intrusion of Catholics into the military and civil establishments, his encouragement of Catholic worship, and his use of the royal prerogative to remove the legal disabilities on his co-religionists.

The Standing Army

In the aftermath of the Monmouth rebellion, James expanded his army to just under 20,000, around which number it stabilized until the eve of the Revolution, when there was a further build-up of forces. Whether James had the legal right to keep such an army in being during a time of peace is a complicated issue. The Militia Act of 1661, which confirmed the crown's control over all forces by land and sea, dealt with the militia and soldiers who might be recruited for a foreign war; it made no mention of a standing army in times of peace. There was nothing technically to prevent the English king from hiring soldiers if he had the resources to pay for them, but normally such funding would have to come from parliament. Charles II had kept a small military establishment for his own personal security, and those occasions when he did seek to build up his standing forces were purportedly to fight a foreign war, with the troops funded through parliamentary subsidies; when peace was secured or if war never materialized, parliament called for the disbanding of such troops. James's parliament of 1685 had discussed the issue of the standing army and had been prepared to vote funds for its support (if not as much as the King had wanted), though James prorogued this parliament before the necessary legislation had been passed. Yet thanks to the improvement in the yield from customs and excise, James found he could afford to fund the army without parliamentary assistance. The legal situation was thus unclear, though it appears to have been the assumption among those who framed and voted legislation that the king would rely on the militia in times of peace, only recruit soldiers when needed for foreign war (on which occasions he would go to parliament for financial backing), and disband such troops again in peacetime.

Yet if the king did have the resources to hire his own forces without parliamentary funding, he faced the problem of how to discipline and where to quarter them. The Petition of Right of 1628 had declared against both the imposition of martial law in times of peace and the billeting of troops on private householders, while the Disbanding Act of 1679 had categorically stated that no private householders could be compelled to receive soldiers into their houses without their consent. James did declare martial law in Berwick-upon-Tweed in February 1685, when there were fears of possible unrest at the border at the time of his accession; he also appointed a general court martial in July 1685 to deal with deserters or other crimes and misdemeanours committed by soldiers, though this was revoked after the suppression of the Monmouth rebellion. In June 1686, a council-of-war set up a court martial to enforce martial law within the bounds of the military encampment on Hounslow Heath, because James believed that the civil magistrates were too lenient towards deserters. Yet James realized he could not declare martial law generally across England without being in flagrant violation of the Petition of Right, and so he tried to get desertion accounted a felony at common law. The recorder of London, Sir John Holt, steadfastly refused to give judgment against deserters on the grounds that no one could be put to death for running away from their colours unless there had been a proclamation of war. In September 1686, however, Jeffreys (who had been appointed Lord Chancellor the previous September, following Baron Guilford's death) canvassed the opinion of nine of the judges, who all determined that desertion in peacetime was a capital felony. Holt was subsequently dismissed. In March 1688 James established a standing court martial in London to hear all cases concerning those in the armed forces and to handle civilian complaints against the military, and in August of that year he issued orders that deserters could be tried before a regimental or general court martial, without even issuing a formal declaration of martial law. Increasingly, the armed forces seemed to be beyond the control of the common law.¹⁶

Lacking sufficient barracks, James had no option but to quarter many of his troops in public and even private houses, and although he insisted they should pay their way, there were frequent reports of abuses and of soldiers not paying for food and lodging. James even stationed troops within the City of London, without seeking the permission of the corporation (which was an overwhelmingly Tory body after the purges of Charles II's final years): some of the troops were quartered in taverns and alehouses in Fleet Street and Salisbury Court, others in converted nonconformist meeting-houses in the Broad Street area, which had been seized on the grounds of their owners’ alleged disaffection to the government.¹⁷ It was a tactless move that could only serve to antagonize both ends of the political spectrum within the metropolis. When the civic authorities tried to resolve a dispute that flared up over the quartering of troops in Aldgate in April 1687 – the soldiers had a warrant from a Middlesex JP for quarters in Middlesex, but not for within the City of London itself – the soldiers responded by telling the city magistrates ‘that they were Cuckolds and should be so made by them, That they would Quarter in their houses, and turne them out of Guild Hall… that they were not worthy to kiss their Arses, And that not the Civill Officers but the Soldiers were the Keepers of the Peace of the Kingdome’. It was an affront that Londoners were not prepared to take lying down. A crowd of local butchers and seamen assembled, armed with cleavers and other weapons, determined to teach the troops a lesson, and it took considerable effort on the Lord Mayor's part to defuse the situation and prevent a potential bloodbath. On this occasion, upon complaint by the City, James was quick to reassure the Lord Mayor ‘that itt was never his designe that the Military power should oversway the Civil but they should allwayes behave themselves orderly’, and he immediately suspended the troops' captain from duty.¹⁸ James was doubtless sincere. The question was, could he realistically control the soldiery? Only a couple of months later a few soldiers forced entry into the garden of a man who lived in the village of Teddington in Middlesex; the man and some of his neighbours tried to stop them, and in the ensuing fight two of the villagers were killed.¹⁹

Problems with troops were reported from all over the country. A number of complaints reached the privy council in early 1686 of soldiers stationed in the West ‘beating’ men, ‘prostituting’ women and ‘wasting’ people's provisions.²⁰ Towards the end of the year soldiers in the East Midlands killed a barrowman at Loughborough and another man at Leicester.²¹ When, in December 1686, a Maidstone innkeeper dared to suggest that the captain of the troops he was quartering should settle his account speedily, because the captain was losing so much money gambling, the captain and his men took their revenge by shaving one side of the innkeeper's head and leading him through the streets in a halter, first to the whipping-post, then to the pillory. Only a timely intervention by the mayor managed to prevent a riot between the troops and the townsmen, although the captain subsequently threatened to kill the mayor if he reported the incident to the King.²²

The sorts of tensions that could develop between soldiers and civilians are well illustrated by what happened at the funeral of the Countess of Strafford (the wife of the second Earl) at York on 13 January 1686. Trouble erupted because troops from the Castle were appointed to march with the hearse as it was transported through the city to the Minster. A crowd of over 500 ‘Prentices and lusty young fellows’ attacked the soldiers as they marched through Stonegate, crying ‘letts knock the Black Guards braines out’, throwing stones and brickbats at them and beating them with clubs. The rioting continued into the Minster itself and a number of soldiers were badly hurt before eventually the troops opened fire in an attempt to drive the crowd away. After the commotion had died down, the lieutenant of the company attacked sent the Lord Mayor the names of the ringleaders, demanding warrants for their arrest. The mayor refused, however, protesting that he ‘would know by what Order the Souldiers Guarded the Herse’, claiming that the governor of the Castle had no right to give such an order since the city of York itself was ‘noe Garrison’. For some time after the riot, soldiers found they could not walk the streets without being called ‘Red Coate Rogue’ or ‘black Guard dog’. Informers were reluctant to come forward against the rioters, and although a few of the ringleaders were eventually tried and convicted, they were too poor to pay their fines, and at the intercession of the Lord Mayor and aldermen the judges decided to issue a reprieve and release them from prison.²³

The Issue of the Dispensing Power

Public anxiety stemmed not just from the fact that James had established a standing army, but that it was a standing army into which he had begun to intrude Catholics. This anxiety was further fuelled by a couple of powerful broadsides written by the Whig cleric Samuel ‘Julian’ Johnson (nicknamed Julian for his stinging attack on the doctrine of passive obedience in 1682, entitled Julian the Apostate). In March 1686 a trenchant satire of his literally hit the streets of London (apparently being left lying around for passers-by to pick up), advertising ‘Several Reasons for the Establishment of a Standing Army, and Dissolving the Militia’. Among them were the supposed facts that ‘the Lords, Gentlemen, and Free-holders of England’ were ‘not fit to be trusted with their own Laws, Lives, Liberties, and Estates’; that there were ‘no Irish Papists in the Militia’, who were ‘certainly the best Souldiers in the World’, because they had ‘slain Men, Women, and Children, by Hundreds of Thousands at once’; and that ‘the Dragooners’ had made ‘more Converts than all the Bishops and Clergy of France’. Later that spring, Johnson produced his ‘Humble and Hearty Address to all English Protestants in this Present Army’ (some 20,000 copies of which were distributed among the army at Hounslow Heath, and a further 20,000 across the country at large), in which he pleaded with the Protestants in the army to consider why they had joined with the papists, who would ‘fight for the Mass… burn the Bible, and who seeke to extirpate the Protestant Religion with your Sword because they cannot do it with their own’. It was a bold, confrontational tract, which earned its author a fine of 500 marks, degradation from the ministry, and a severe whipping at the hands of the common hangman.²⁴

Although James appears to have been keen to intrude Catholics into the English army, there were limits to what he could do, given the small size of the English Catholic population. By the end of 1685 about 10 per cent of the commissioned officers were Catholic, a figure that fell to less than 9 per cent by November 1687 before rising to about 11 per cent by October 1688. Among the rank and file of the soldiery, Catholics probably constituted considerably less than 10 per cent of the whole.²⁵ Nevertheless, these percentages were much higher than the proportion of Catholics in the English population as a whole, and by the terms of the Test Act of 1673 officers were required to swear the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and sign a declaration against transubstantiation within three months of taking up their commission, or face dismissal. James had granted Catholic officers dispensations from these requirements in November 1685, and did so again in January 1686, but to do this every three months (or else dismiss and reappoint his Catholic officers) would be costly, cumbersome and time-consuming. A more satisfactory, longer-term solution was necessary. It was provided by the test case of Godden v. Hales, which came before King's Bench in June 1686.

Sir Edward Hales was a Catholic who had taken up a commission as colonel without meeting the requirements of the Test Act, an offence which carried with it a fine of £500; the action against him was brought by his own coachman, Arthur Godden, who, under the terms of the Test Act, was entitled to recover the fine for himself. Hales pleaded a royal dispensation; the prosecution accepted the plea as true but denied it was a sufficient answer. It was a collusive action, purposefully brought in order to provide an opportunity for a judicial ruling on whether or not the dispensing power was legal. The judges concluded by a majority of eleven to one that it was. In giving his judgment, the presiding judge Lord Chief Justice Herbert asserted that because kings of England were ‘sovereign princes’ and the laws ‘the king's laws’, it was ‘an inseparable prerogative in the kings of England, to dispense with penal laws in particular cases, and upon particular necessary reasons’, and that ‘of those reasons and those necessaries, the king himself is sole judge’. During the trial the judges heard arguments from both sides concerning the various legal precedents. The case for the dispensing power, made by the Solicitor General Sir Thomas Powis, rested upon a distinction between an offence that was malum in se (wrong in itself) and one that was malum prohibitum (illegal merely because prohibited by statute). The king could not dispense with the former – he could not dispense with the law of God. But he could dispense someone from a statute which prohibited something that had once been lawful, provided he did not violate the private interest of any of his subjects. Powis then proceeded to draw a distinction between acts of parliament concerning property, which could not be dispensed with, and those concerning government, which could. Although citing various precedents, the most telling was a judicial decision from the second year of Henry VIPs reign (1486) as reported by the early Stuart jurist Sir Edward Coke, which had confirmed that the king could dispense with an Act of 23 Henry VI, c. 8 (1445), forbidding any man from serving as sheriff of one county for a period of more than one year. It was this which clinched the argument for Herbert, since the original statute of Henry VI's reign had stated that if a sheriff were appointed for a period longer than one year, ‘the patent shall be void, notwithstanding any Non Obstante [dispensation] to the contrary’, and yet ‘by the opinion of all the judges of England’, Herbert said, the king could still dispense with that statute.²⁶

Legal historians, following such reasoning, have tended to conclude that James was well within his rights when issuing dispensations from the Test Act.²⁷ Most contemporaries would have disagreed, however. The case was not only a feigned action, but the King had rigged the bench to ensure a favourable verdict. He had sounded out the views of his twelve judges in advance, and removed six who had said that he could not dispense Catholics from the Test. Six more pliable individuals were found as replacements, one of whom, Christopher Milton, was a suspected Catholic. When the King told Lord Chief Justice Jones of Common Pleas of his determination to find twelve lawyers who would stand by him ‘in this matter of the Dispensation’, Jones replied that he might ‘find 12 Gownmen, but not 12 Lawyers’.²⁸ A stanza affixed to the gate of Westminster Hall compared the judges' decision to Judas's betrayal of Christ:

When nature's God for our offenses di'd
Amongst the twelve one Judas did reside.
Here's twelve assembled for the nation's peace
Amongst which twelve, eleven are Judases.
One's true to's trust, but all the rest accord
With Jews and pagans to betray their Lord.
What madness, slaves! What is't could ye provoke
To stoop again unto the Romish yoke?
May ye be curs'd and all your hopes demolish'd-
And perish by those laws ye have abolish'd!29

Local JPs were upset with the verdict, praising the ‘one honest Church of England judge amongst the twelve that was against the Dispensation’ and refusing to wait on the other judges when they went on their circuits that summer, as a sign of their disgust.³⁰ Morrice relates that many legal experts questioned the reasoning behind Herbert's verdict. Some held that the statutes about the sheriffs were not of the same nature as the Test Act, so that the dispensing of the former could not serve as a precedent. Others insisted that even though many sheriffs had served for terms of longer than a year, in all cases their commissions had run only for one year, and they were renewed every year, so there had never been any dispensation from the Act of 23 Henry VI. Besides, Coke had been wrong, many observed, in claiming that in Henry VIPs time a judgment had been given ‘by all the Judges that the King might dispense in this case’, since the year books recorded that the judges specifically stated that anything they had said about this matter should ‘be looked upon as not said’. Justice Street, the sole judge who opposed the ruling, later claimed that although outnumbered eleven to one on the judicial bench, ‘there were more then eleaven of the people’ that took his side ‘for one of the people that were of the eleaven Judges side’.³¹

James's desire to give commissions to Catholics in the army, then, had led him to assault the independence of the judiciary and, as far as many contemporaries were concerned, to subvert the rule of law. He had upset the magisterial classes of England in the process, while the mere existence of such a large standing army had caused serious tensions with the civilian population. And for what end? The King had an army that was still overwhelmingly Protestant, though one which now had more internal divisions thanks to the intrusion of Catholics. James had created a climate of distrust with seemingly little, if any, political gain for himself.

Catholic Toleration

James not only wanted to ensure that his co-religionists had the ability to practise their religion peaceably but also to create an environment that would encourage his Protestant subjects to convert. He appears to have believed that by providing toleration for Catholics and allowing them to promote the faith through the general arts of persuasion, conversions would inevitably follow.³² As a strategy it was naïve, if not in and of itself particularly sinister. The way in which he pursued it, however, involved a vaunting of the powers of the monarchy and further violations of the rule of law.

At first, James proceeded cautiously. Shortly after his accession, he set up an official council of Catholics to advise him on religious affairs, and towards the end of the year he removed a few MPs from office who had opposed him in the Commons in November, but otherwise he continued to rely on those who had served his brother at the end of his reign, with Rochester as Lord Treasurer, Jeffreys as Lord Chancellor, and the flexible Sunderland as Secretary of State (as yet still Protestant, though beginning to set himself up as the head of the Catholic interest). James appointed perhaps one Catholic judge and possibly no more than one Catholic JP prior to the winter of 1686/7. The decision in Godden v. Hales, however, allowed him to admit Catholics to his privy council and five Catholic peers – Lords Powis, Arundell of Wardour, Belasyse, Dover and the Earl of Tyrconnell – were sworn in over the summer and autumn of 1686. Then in November 1687 James admitted the Jesuit priest and his trusted confidant, Edward Petre, to the council. Described by Burnet as ‘a man of no learning, nor any way famed for his virtue, but who made all up in boldness and zeal’, Petre's influence with the King was such that he soon came to be ‘considered as the first minister of state’.

In September 1685 James had reopened diplomatic relations with Rome, sending the Earl of Castlemaine there as ambassador and receiving (in November) Ferdinando d'Adda as a papal envoy (and from the spring of 1687, papal nuncio). However, James never intended to make the British monarchy subservient to the papacy. Thus he maintained his position as head of the Church and insisted on his right to nominate all ecclesiastical dignitaries within his kingdoms – not just Protestant bishops in England and Scotland (as we would reasonably expect) but also Catholic bishops and deans in Ireland, where his legal right to do so was highly questionable.³³ With regard to the Church of England, James recognized that his most realistic option was to try to work with its leadership, since he was unable to sack the Anglican bishops, whose appointments were for life. The only time he could affect the complexion of the episcopal bench was when a particular bishop died. He kept the archiepiscopal see of York vacant following the death of its incumbent, John Dolben, in April 1686, so that the revenues could revert to the crown; it was not until November 1688, at the time of William of Orange's invasion, that he finally appointed a replacement, the Bishop of Exeter, Thomas Lamplugh. In the autumn of 1686, he found two pliant individuals, Thomas Cartwright and Samuel Parker, to appoint to the vacant sees of Chester and Oxford. Both were to prove their worth to the crown over the next couple of years, in supporting James's more controversial policies.

There had been talk from the very beginning of the reign that James was going to declare a general religious toleration, but the King was unwilling to take such a bold initiative so soon.³⁴ He did, however, devise a scheme of helping his co-religionists while at the same time continuing to allow for the enforcement of the penal laws against Protestant nonconformists. Thus on 11 May 1685, James ordered the stay of all processes against recusants who came from families that had suffered for their loyalty during the Civil War or who could otherwise prove their loyalty; given that most Catholics had been loyal, whereas most Protestant nonconformists came from parliamentary backgrounds and had sided with the Whigs under Charles II, it is clear which religious group such an order favoured. James followed this on 2 June by ordering that monies collected from recusants that had not yet been paid into the Exchequer be restored to the persons fined. The procedure needed to be repeated to ensure continued relief, and so on 24 February 1686 James issued a more general warrant, discharging all fines and staying all proceedings against loyal recusants until his pleasure ‘be further known’.³⁵

James encouraged his Catholic subjects to follow his example and celebrate the mass openly. He opened his own chapels to the public, encouraged foreign ambassadors in and around London to do the same, and provided money to the secular and regular Catholic clergy to advance their missionary efforts. Catholic laymen and women, both rich and poor, also provided money for the establishing of chapels, while Catholic chapels were set up in garrison towns to serve those Catholics in the armed forces. By the spring of 1686 there were Catholic chapels ‘in many of the great Cityes in England’, including London, Worcester and Bristol, and by 1688 in most provincial towns of any size. London itself had eighteen Catholic chapels by the autumn of 1688. James also promoted Catholic schools, including two Jesuit schools in the capital.³⁶ A couple of disused Anglican chapels were made over for Catholic use, but on the whole the Catholics either erected new buildings or rented halls or rooms for their purposes. There was no attempt, as in Ireland and Scotland, to convert buildings in use by the Established Church into places of Catholic worship. In January 1686 reports spread that James was about to issue quo warranto proceedings against cathedral churches, though this was something the King was quick to deny.³⁷ The government did, however, launch enquiries into the titles to former monastic lands, with the ultimate aim not of restoring such lands to the see of Rome but to the English crown. Many of the grants made by Henry VIII had been for long leases, and the proprietors had often not bought the reversion of the lease when it expired, so the land technically had reverted to the crown. In April 1686 James issued a commission to seize the temporalities of the Archbishopric of York into the King's hands. He also challenged the rights of the proprietors of Bermondsey Abbey, St Thomas's Hospital in Southwark, St Katharine's Hospital near the Tower, and other parts of London, on the grounds that their leases were no longer valid, as well as those of some provincial landowners, such as Sir Ralph Dutton in Gloucestershire (the greatest part of whose estate was in abbey lands).³⁸

In the campaign to win converts, James believed the press could play a crucial role. He therefore sanctioned the publication of numerous books, pamphlets, broadsheets and devotional manuals, with large print runs to make sure there were enough to reach the intended target audience. Most of them were produced by the King's official printer, Henry Hills; many of them ended up being given away free of charge. Instead of fulminating against Protestant heresies, the strategy pursued was to offer a plain and clear exposition of what the Catholic Church actually stood for, in the hope that by freeing people's minds from prejudices inculcated by years of misrepresentation, they would become more receptive to the possibility of conversion.³⁹ Yet James's missionary effort produced very few conversions. A handful in the higher echelons of government became Catholics, among them the earls of Salisbury and Peterborough and, eventually, also the Earl of Sunderland (though not until after the birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688, and Sunderland was to convert back after the Revolution). So too did a few JPs and a handful of Oxbridge dons. In the navy, Rear-Admiral Sir Roger Strickland converted in the winter of 1686/7, followed by a number of his clients; James was subsequently to reward this pool of converts with rapid promotion (Strickland himself rose to vice-admiral and then admiral), which obviously alienated those Protestant seamen who saw their own advancement thwarted. The visibility of these converts certainly caused alarm, but they hardly constituted a numerically significant trend. Very few amongst the mass of the population were won over to the Catholic faith. In Worcestershire, one of the more Catholic counties in England, there were just 12 reconciliations in 1685, 11 the next year, and only 6 more in the next two years - a mere 29 in four years, compared to 30 in the four years 1660–63 and 46 in 1693–6. In Birmingham there were more: 147 in 1685–8, compared to 121 in 1660–62.⁴⁰ However, nationwide, the figures were extremely low. As a result, with the exception of a few areas, there simply were not enough Catholics to fill all the new chapels. Some 300 Catholics heard mass in Worcester on Candlemas Day (2 February) in 1687, but this was an exception. In York, the Catholics took over five rooms for the public celebration of mass, but there were only about fifty or sixty Catholics in the city, and just three converts. A small congregation gathered at Oxford, but it included no more than four scholars, the rest being local residents (among them, two of the most infamous city prostitutes). Even the Jacobite Life was later to concede that James proceeded with ‘an imprudent zeal in erecting more Chappels, than there were faithful sufficient to fill, or Priests to be found well qualify'd to officiate in’, thereby exposing ‘the holy misteries to the mockery and dirision of the people’.⁴¹

The Anglican Response and the Ecclesiastical Commission

James's attempts to promote the Catholic faith provoked widespread opposition from his Protestant subjects, and particularly from Tory-Anglican interests. The Anglican clergy orchestrated a press and pulpit campaign to defend their version of true faith against the efforts of Catholic polemicists. The lead was taken by a group of London-based divines, among them John Tillotson, Edward Stillingfleet, Thomas Tenison, Simon Patrick, William Sherlock and William Wake, who formed an agreement both to preach against the errors of the Roman Church and to publish ‘a great variety of small books, that were easily purchased and soon read’. The nonconformist clergy were not totally silent: the Presbyterians and Independents in and around Oxford, for example, held morning meetings during the week when they preached against popery. Most dissenters, however, aware of the vulnerability of their position after years of persecution, were prepared to leave the job of defending the Protestant religion ‘to the Pastors and Gentlemen of the Church of England’. According to one contemporary calculation, nonconformists published just three books against popery in James II's reign, compared to 228 by members of the Church of England.⁴²

James and his supporters were horrified by the apparent rapid change of allegiance of the clerical establishment. It appeared that ‘the very same men’ who had helped place James on his throne by preaching up non-resistance now ‘had a mind to Preach him out again’, as one pamphleteer put it, ‘Arbitrary Power, Popery, Protestant Religion’ being made ‘more the Theme of the Pulpit, than before it had been of the Fanaticks Papers and Pamphlets’.⁴³ On 5 March 1686, therefore, James issued his Directions to Preachers (it was, in fact, a reissue of Charles II's Directions of 1662), ordering the clergy to avoid religious controversy and concentrate on practical and moral divinity.⁴⁴ Anti-Catholic sermonizing nevertheless continued. Some did at least pay lip-service to the prohibition. One witty Oxford cleric, instructed by his vice-chancellor not to preach against popery, gave his audience ‘a brief Scheame’ of what he would have said, had he not been forbidden.⁴⁵

James's efforts to promote Catholic worship provoked unrest in several communities when Catholic chapels first began to be opened. Although James had issued dispensations from the Tests and stopped loyal Catholics being prosecuted for recusancy, Catholic worship remained, for the time being, illegal. There was one exception, however: foreign ambassadors and diplomats were allowed to erect their own chapels where they and their servants could worship in private. In early 1686, James encouraged James Stamford, the Elector Palatine's envoy, to take up a residence in Lime Street in the heart of London and convert it into a Catholic chapel; the money came in part from the King, and in part from Catholic merchants in the City and the secular clergy. The chapel was clearly much too big for the needs of Stamford's household, and it was unprecedented for foreign ministers, who typically resided around the court in Westminster, to erect places of Catholic worship within the City of London itself. Moreover, Stamford was an Englishman, not a foreigner merely seeking to continue to practise the official religion of his home country while temporarily resident abroad, while the Elector himself did not even know about the chapel and was later to deny that he had wanted it built. The whole scheme was a transparent sham, an attempt by James to establish Catholic worship in the City under a cloak of legality, and in late March the Tory Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Geffrey – perhaps at the instigation of Bishop Compton of London – tried to stop the construction work on the grounds that the chapel was illegal. The King intervened, rebuked the Lord Mayor, and ordered the work to continue.

When the chapel opened on Sunday 18 April, a crowd of people, many of them apprentices, followed the priests to mass, threatening to ‘break their crosses and juggling-boxes down’. The local constables and trained bands came to suppress the disturbances, but on the whole their sympathies were with the crowd. They let one of the ringleaders they had apprehended ‘slip away’ and rejoin the fracas; he was later seen pulling one of the priests out of the chapel and dragging him through the gutter. Crowds gathered again the following Sunday, saying ‘they would have no wooden gods worshipped there’. When the Lord Mayor tried to restore order, back came the cry: ‘What! Is the Lord Mayor of our city come to preach up Popery?’ The trained bands were again reluctant to act, feeling that if the crowd intended ‘Only pulling down Popery’ they could not ‘in conscience hinder’. The King threatened to send in his own troops if the Lord Mayor did not take better care to preserve the peace, but the attempts of the trained bands the following week to protect the celebrants as they made their way to mass merely provoked further conflicts with Protestant protesters. Although over the course of the disturbances the authorities did succeed in making about twenty arrests, some of those taken into custody turned out to be Catholics – presumably the innocent victims rather than the perpetrators of the unrest, but guilty by dint of their religion in the eyes of the Protestant arresting officers – who were later released by special warrant.⁴⁶

There were similar riots against Catholic worship in Worcester and Coventry that spring.⁴⁷ At Bristol in late April, the mayor, at the instigation of a local Tory zealot, Sir John Knight, not only put a stop to the celebration of the mass at a hastily constructed chapel near the Custom House, but had the priest and his entire congregation arrested and thrown into prison. When those arrested threatened to report his actions to the King, the mayor defiantly replied that he would save them the trouble and do it himself. Knight was subsequently indicted at King's Bench for going armed with a blunderbuss through the streets and disrupting a public church service ‘to the terrour of his Majesties’ Liege people', but a jury composed of Bristol men acquitted him.⁴⁸ Towards the end of May the ‘lower orders’ of Bristol staged a public procession ‘in Scoff of Popery… carrying before them a piece of Bread with much ceremony’; as part of the parade, a couple dressed as the Virgin Mary and a monk were seen fondling each other ‘very rudely and immoderately’.⁴⁹

Believing such attacks had been fuelled by anti-Catholic preaching, James determined he needed to keep the Anglican clergy in line. Many clergy, however, felt that they could not properly fulfil their pastoral role if they were not allowed to address the concerns of their parishioners about the right path to salvation. It was an anonymous letter from one of his parishioners in spiritual doubt that provoked John Sharp, Dean of Norwich and rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, to speak on a forbidden subject from the pulpit of St Giles in May.⁵⁰ James ordered Bishop Compton of London to suspend Sharp, but Compton (who had already taken a public stance against James in the parliamentary session of November 1685) refused, insisting that due legal process had to be followed and that Sharp was entitled to a fair hearing.⁵¹ This brought the issue of control of the Anglican clergy to a head. Since the bishops could not be trusted to police the Church, James decided in July to set up a commission ‘for the inspecting of Ecclesiastical Affairs’. There were to be seven commissioners – Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, Lord Treasurer Rochester, Lord President Sunderland, the bishops of Durham and Rochester, and Lord Chief Justice Herbert – though only three were required for a quorum, of whom the Lord Chancellor had to be one. Sancroft refused to sit; he was later replaced by Cartwright of Chester. The main purpose behind the establishment of this Ecclesiastical Commission was ‘for the prevention of Indiscreet Preaching’, though the commissioners were authorized to execute and exercise all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, punish offences against the ecclesiastical laws and impose Church censures as they thought fit, and visit and discipline ecclesiastical institutions (including the universities). The Ecclesiastical Commission's first act was to suspend Compton from his duties as bishop for his refusal to suspend Sharp.⁵²

Since the Ecclesiastical Commission was to be declared illegal in 1689, let us consider its status at law more fully. The crown's powers of governance over the Church in England were based upon the royal supremacy established by the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s and confirmed under Queen Elizabeth. Article 17 of the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy of 1559 vested in the crown visitorial power over all ecclesiastical bodies, including colleges and universities, while article 18 permitted the crown ‘by Letters Patentes under the Greate Seale’ to appoint commissioners to ‘execute all manner of Jurisdictions, Privileges, and Preheminences in any wise touching or concerning any Spiritual or Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction’ within England and Ireland.⁵³ Elizabeth had set up a Court of High Commission to keep discipline in the Church, but during her reign its scope was limited to imposing ecclesiastical censures on those in clerical orders. Charles I, however, had allowed the Court to fine and imprison lay people and to tender oaths ex officio. In 1641, on the eve of the Civil War, the Long Parliament determined that Charles had misinterpreted article 18 of the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy and repealed that article in its entirety. This repeal was confirmed by legislation enacted in 1661 following the Restoration.⁵⁴

Despite the repealing legislation, however, historians have tended to the view that James was technically within his rights when he established his Ecclesiastical Commission in 1686.⁵⁵ This is supposedly because Charles I's Court of High Commission and James II's Ecclesiastical Commission were two very different bodies: the latter, it has been said, was not a court, did not call itself such, and limited itself to imposing ecclesiastical censures on ecclesiastical persons. Moreover, the repealing legislation of 1641 had not touched article 17 of the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy, while the act of 1661 had reaffirmed the crown's supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and how could the royal supremacy be exercised, unless the king was allowed to appoint commissioners to act on his behalf? When James consulted his judges they told him that the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy had, in fact, given the crown no new power, but had only declared what power was originally in the crown; therefore, the King might set up an ecclesiastical commission ‘by Vertue of the Supream Power originally Vested in him in all Ecclesiastical matters’, which had been confirmed by the act of 1661.⁵⁶ According to the Jacobite Life, James believed that his Ecclesiastical Commission was sanctioned by the act of 1661 so long as the commissioners kept within the bounds of ecclesiastical censures and did none of those things proscribed by the act of 1641 (such as fining, imprisoning, or tendering oaths ex officio). James also, apparently, had an honourable motive: ‘it seem'd incongruous to him’, given that he was a Roman Catholic, that ‘he should exercise in person that Jurisdiction over the Church of England, which the Law vests in the Sovereign’. Was he not, therefore, not only acting within the letter of the law but also with due scrupulousness in setting up a commission of Anglican clerics and laymen to inspect ecclesiastical affairs?⁵⁷

With regard to James's scruples, one must both recognize the positive retrospective gloss put on James's intentions by the Jacobite Life, and also ask why he found it necessary to inspect ecclesiastical affairs at this juncture in the first place. As to the law, it was certainly open to interpretation. A number of points need to be made, however. Contemporaries unquestionably thought of James's Ecclesiastical Commission as a ‘court’ from its inception, ‘for so properly it is’, as one newsletter writer sympathetic to the court put it. When Compton asked at his trial to see ‘a copy of their Lordships Commission’, the commissioners replied that ‘no Courts granted copies of their commission’; Jeffreys, who presided over the Commission, referred to it as a court, and the erstwhile Whig publicist turned government propagandist, Henry Care, subsequently wrote a tract vindicating ‘the Legality of the Court Held by His Majesties Ecclesiastical Commissioners’.⁵⁸ Furthermore, although the act of 1641 had not specifically repealed article 17 of the Elizabethan Supremacy Act, when repealing article 18 it had explicitly repealed and voided ‘for ever’ the crown's right to appoint commissioners to exercise any manner of spiritual or ecclesiastical jurisdiction, ‘Any thing in the said Act to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding’ – clearly implying that article 17 could not be used to legitimize the setting up of an ecclesiastical commission at a future date.⁵⁹

After consulting with a number of lawyers, Compton decided ‘to demur to the jurisdiction of the Court’, protesting to the commissioners that although he did ‘not intend any thing… Derogatory to the King's Supremacy’ or ‘undutifull to his Majesty’, his counsel had told him that their ‘proceedings in this Court [were] directly Contrary to the Statute Law’.⁶⁰ The belief that the Ecclesiastical Commission was illegal appears to have been fairly widespread. When a group of Sussex gentlemen met for dinner at the residence of Sir John Ashburnham, MP for Hastings and a JP and deputy Lieutenant, there was ‘a great deale of discourse concerning the Legallity of High Commissions’, which all ‘considered to be unlawfull’.⁶¹ On 16 August an anonymous correspondent wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, inviting him to petition the King to review or recall his Ecclesiastical Commission and enclosing a letter for James, informing the King of ‘the dreadful apprehensions’ many of his ‘truest Subjects’ had ‘of the tendency of your Late Commission’ and urging him to reconsider whether ‘it bee noe way Injurious, to the established Laws in Church and State’.⁶² A number of manuscript treatises were prepared that sought to demonstrate beyond doubt that the Ecclesiastical Commission was illegal. Sir Robert Atkyns considered the argument that the King might set up an Ecclesiastical Commission, notwithstanding the act of repeal, by virtue of the ecclesiastical supremacy vested in the crown by the Henrician Reformation, to be fallacious. Even if the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy had merely declared what power was originally in the crown, an examination of the Henrician Reformation statutes made it clear that the crown's ecclesiastical jurisdiction was to be exercised in the appropriate ecclesiastical courts: the archidiaconal, diocesan, or metropolitan courts, or else convocation. On the other hand, if Elizabeth ‘by her meer prerogative and supreme power’ could already have granted an ecclesiastical commission, then there was no need of article 18 in the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy. It was clear, then, ‘that it needed an act of parliament to give such authority to Elizabeth to grant such letters patents, or commission; and that without an act of parliament such commission could not have been granted’. Since article 18 had been repealed in 1641, and the repeal confirmed in 1661, Atkyns concluded that ‘no such commission nor letters patents’ could ‘now be granted, but the repealing act… stands in force against it’.⁶³

BUILDING NEW ALLIANCES AND THE POLITICS OF INDULGENCE

By the summer of 1686 James, now approaching 53 years of age, had managed to establish a sizeable peacetime standing army, won a vitally important test case upholding his right to dispense Catholics from the Test, broken the Anglican monopoly of worship and established effective toleration for loyal recusants, and had erected an Ecclesiastical Commission that could be used to discipline the Church. All this had been achieved at enormous political cost, however. James had alienated his parliament, an overwhelmingly Tory-Anglican body that had shown itself deeply supportive of his succession. He had upset the Anglican divines, including key figures on the episcopal bench, such as Bishop Compton of London, provoked the opposition of Tory magistrates in key corporations, such as London and Bristol, and had managed to generate considerable opposition out-of-doors, with his policies causing outbursts of rioting in several parts of the kingdom.

Nor had he, as yet, secured any lasting benefits for his co-religionists. Granting individual Catholics dispensations from the penal laws not only took time and involved expensive legal fees for the beneficiary, but they could only be expected from a Catholic monarch; James still had no Catholic heir and looked set to be succeeded by his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. To establish a permanent toleration for the Catholic population in England would require a repeal of the penal laws, and this could only be achieved through parliament. However, given the opposition there had been to the limited relief granted Catholics to date, it seemed unlikely that the traditional allies of the crown would show much support for such an initiative. In the end, James decided to abandon the Tory-Anglican interest and forge an alliance with Protestant nonconformists, the crucial shift occurring in the winter and spring of 1686–7. It is more accurate to think in terms of a phased transition, however, since James began courting dissenters long before he had any thoughts of abandoning the Church party, and he tried for as long as possible to carry the Tory-Anglican interest with him.

James's policy of wooing the dissenters began piecemeal over the course of 1686. On 10 March he issued a general pardon embracing a wide range of offences, including attending unlawful conventicles and not coming to church and excluding only desperate moral deviants and certain categories of rebels.⁶⁴ Over the next month some 1,200 Quakers were freed.⁶⁵ Later that spring he informed the Quakers that they were free to hold their religious meetings, and when the Baptists delivered an address of thanks for the royal pardon he told them, too, that they could expect his protection, so long as they remained loyal. In several parts of the country Anglican zealots responded by stepping up their drive against dissent – disturbing meetings ‘with as great fierceness as ever’ and hauling conventiclers before the local authorities, ‘notwithstanding what verball immunity they said they had’ – insisting that if they did not enforce the penal laws strictly against nonconformists, it would be impossible to protect the Church against popery. James started granting Quakers dispensations, for a fee, to protect them from persecution (it cost 50 shillings to secure a dispensation for a whole family), but soon showed himself ready to extend protection to other dissenting groups who petitioned for relief. Those who refused to petition – mainly Presbyterians and Independents – continued to suffer.⁶⁶

Dispensing dissenters from the Conventicle Act, however, raised the issue of whether the king could deny informers one-third of the fine levied on convicted conventiclers that they were entitled to under the terms of the 1670 Conventicle Act. Both the defence counsel and the presiding judge in Godden v. Hales had acknowledged that the king could not issue dispensations even for mala prohibita if doing so violated a third party's property rights. Although Hales had, in fact, been forgiven the fine due the plaintiff, the dispensation had been ruled valid on the grounds that the case was analogous to that of dispensations given to sheriffs to serve for more than one year. Could the ruling be extended to conventicling? Besides, Godden had been acting in collusion with the defendant and never had any intention of collecting the fine; the case would be different when there were parties who were determined to do so. In Leicester in October 1686, a local informer named Smith continued to spy on Quaker meetings, insisting that the King did not have the power to remit his part of the fine. The Leicester magistrates agreed, and told the Quakers ‘that if the Informer doe Still proceed, they must fine as before’.⁶⁷ When a nonconformist preacher in Exeter presented the magistrates who came to disturb his meeting in January 1687 with ‘a Protection from the King’, they replied that ‘the King could not protect them, nor dispense with them against Law’, and proceeded to break up the meeting.⁶⁸ Nevertheless, James was ready to take on the informers. On the petition of the Quaker George Whitehead he appointed two treasury solicitors in June 1686 to investigate the activities of an infamous gang of London informers led by John and George Hilton. The inquiry resulted in the gang leaders being prosecuted for perjury at the Middlesex sessions and prompted further inquiries into the activities of informers operating in other parts of the country.⁶⁹

Towards the end of the summer, James decided to make a progress through the West Country, the area that had shown itself to be most disaffected at the time of his accession and which had benefited most from his royal pardon, in order to test the level of support for him. He set off from Windsor on 23 August, passing through Reading, Marlborough, Badminton, Bristol, Winchester, Salisbury, Southampton, Portsmouth and Farnham, before heading back to Windsor on 31 August. The London Gazette represented the progress as a great public relations success, claiming that both the magistrates and inhabitants of the several places he passed through gave ‘all possible demonstrations of their Duty and Loyalty’. James was certainly received in style by the various members of the nobility with whom he stayed – the Duke of Somerset at Marlborough, the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton, and the Earl of Pembroke at Winchester – and by the leaders of the corporations through which he passed, while the fact that progresses had been ‘very rare of late’ meant that huge crowds gathered ‘in cityes, towns, villages and lanes’ in the hopes of catching a glimpse of royalty. Everywhere he went, James touched for the King's Evil; at Winchester, for example, he touched 250, and gave out the traditional gold coins.⁷⁰ However, the well-informed Roger Morrice, albeit a man who had little time for James II, was sceptical of the success of the progress. He did ‘not heare’, he wrote, ‘that any considerable number of Noblemen or Gentlemen came to wait upon’ the King; the reception at Bristol had been a little frosty, the town having failed to present the expected gift of gold, and in general it seemed that James ‘was not received with that honour and Respect’ afforded other princes.⁷¹

Nevertheless, James's birthday on 14 October seemed to offer confirmation of the continued support of many of his subjects. Bonfires were forbidden in the City of London as a precautionary measure against possible disorder, but in Westminster there were bells and bonfires and ‘the greatest demonstrations of joy’, which, the Gazette claimed, ‘never appeared more general than on this occasion’. At Lincoln's Inn Fields, where ‘two very good Church of England Magistrates’ had arranged with the local churchwardens and constables to set up ‘a common purse’ to fund a bonfire celebration, Titus Oates was burnt in effigy. Another Popish Plot informer, William Bedloe, met the same fate in Drury Lane. There were similar displays in a number of provincial cities and towns, as at Bath, where Charles II's widow kept her court and gave ‘several Hogsheads of Wine… to the People’, Newcastle upon Tyne, where the mayor and aldermen ensured the public fountains ran continuously with wine, Norwich and Oxford.⁷²

Whatever comfort James derived from such displays of public support, however, events on 5 November (the anniversary of England's deliverance from the Catholic Gunpowder Plot of 1605) were soon to remind him that anti-Catholic sentiment across the country continued to run high. In Cambridge a number of clergymen preached so zealously against popery that the University Senate later forced them to make a public recantation.⁷³ In several provincial towns local inhabitants circumvented a royal order against fireworks and bonfires by placing candles in their windows to testify their opposition to popery.⁷⁴ At Gloucester, the mayor agreed to allow just two bonfires in the city, but the bishop insisted that the mayor had no jurisdiction within the precincts of the Cathedral, and so ordered another two bonfires to be made there.⁷⁵ London observed the day with sermons in most churches, the ringing of bells, and – despite the prohibition – bonfires and candlelight illuminations in many parts of the city. In Fleet Street a crowd paraded a man on their shoulders ‘with homes on his head stuck with candles’, presumably to satirize the way people worshipped ‘the Whore of Babylon’, as Protestants styled the Pope (the horns being the symbol of a cuckold). In another part of the capital locals took a goose, the symbol of a simpleton, and stuck a big piece of paper on its breast with the word ‘Torey’ written on it in large letters; the goose, ‘much out of Countenance’, rushed about aimlessly, crying out what sounded like ‘Torey’, the moral being ‘that the Papists Counts [sic] the Toreys' geese'. A group in Warwick Lane reportedly carried an effigy of the Pope in procession, though the locals later claimed they were processing a real corpse and there was certainly no tumult. A stern rebuke from the King ensured that the City authorities took greater care not to allow similar tumults on 17 November (the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession in 1558), though it was reported that ‘the bells rung very much that day’.⁷⁶

By late 1686 it was becoming clear to James that he would not be able to work with the Tory-Anglican interest. One Catholic tract of November 1686 suggested that ‘the Mallice, and Industry of most of the leading Members of the Church of England, must needs att last have Convinct his Majesty how little he can trust their principles, for the Repose, Much lesse Grandure of his Reigne’, and that ‘Liberty of Conscience’ was now ‘the onely thing left’ on which James could hope to ‘build Either his Glory or Safety for the future’.⁷⁷ Symbolically, the most significant indication of James's intention to break with the traditional allies of the crown came when he dismissed the Hyde brothers (his own brothers-in-law) from office in December, replacing Clarendon in Ireland (as we have seen) with the Catholic Tyrconnell, and Rochester at the treasury with a commission presided over by the Catholic Belasyse. James had hoped that Rochester would convert, and admitted in a conference with the Earl on the night of Sunday 19 December that putting him out of his employment came very ‘uneasy to him’, apparently weeping ‘almost all the time’ as he spoke. But, James declared, ‘he found it absolutely necessary for the good of his affairs, that no man must be at the head of his affairs that was not of his own opinion’. Over the autumn and winter of 1686/7 James also set out to reform the county magistracy, an overwhelmingly Tory-Anglican body of men following the purges of Charles II's final years.⁷⁸ In October 1686 he established a special privy council committee to review the commissions of the peace, and by March of the following year it had ordered 498 new appointments (two-thirds of whom were Catholics) and 245 dismissals (the great majority of whom were Anglicans and members of the leading families in their respective shires). Those removed included some former Whigs who had survived the earlier purges of Charles but also many whose loyalty to the crown had never been called into question in the previous reign, including notorious anti-Whig campaigners who had promoted loyal addresses in the early 1680s.⁷⁹

Although James had kept parliament prorogued since November 1685, he had not given up all hope of working with that body. In December 1686 he started interviewing members of both houses to see if they would be willing to support the repeal of the penal laws and the Test Acts; the judges and a few trusted peers put similar questions to those members who remained in the country. The answers received were far from reassuring: most either asked for more time to consider or else replied that they could not possibly decide until they had heard the debates in parliament. A frustrated James dismissed the obstinate peers and MPs from office. Danby, who had no office to lose, told the King emphatically that he would not support a repeal of the penal laws or the Test, stating that he looked upon those laws as ‘the Security of our Religion’.⁸⁰

The Declaration of Indulgence of April 1687

In the spring of 1687 James took the next logical step: instead of granting individual dispensations from the penal laws, he would suspend their operation in their entirety until he could persuade a parliament to repeal them. Exactly when James decided upon this policy is difficult to say, though it may have been as early as September 1686 and it was certainly before the end of that year.⁸¹ It was not until 18 March 1687 that James made the official announcement to his privy council that he was going to issue a general liberty of conscience, claiming that the attempts to enforce religious uniformity had not worked and that toleration would promote domestic peace and increase trade.⁸² The first step, however, had been taken with the issuance of an Indulgence for Scotland on 12 February; the speed with which the English Indulgence followed makes it clear that James was not waiting for reaction in his northern kingdom before deciding upon how to act in England, but rather that the two Indulgences were phased aspects of the same policy (see pp. 169–71).

The English Declaration of Indulgence appeared on 4 April. It opened with the King proclaiming that although he wished all his subjects ‘were members of the Catholic Church’, it had long been his opinion ‘that conscience ought not to be constrained, nor people forced in matters of mere religion’, and that religious persecution ruined the interest of government ‘by spoiling trade’ and ‘depopulating countries’. He therefore thought fit to grant indulgence by virtue of his ‘royal prerogative’. He promised he would continue to ‘protect and maintain’ both the clergy and laity of the Church of England ‘in the free exercise of their religion as by law established, and in the quiet and full enjoyment of all their possessions’, including any church or abbey lands they might happen to possess. But it was his ‘royal will’ that ‘the execution of… all manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical’ should ‘be immediately suspended’, so that his ‘loving subjects' might have ‘leave to meet and serve God after their own way and manner, be it in private houses or places purposely hired or built for that use’. The Declaration further stipulated that no tests would henceforth be required of office-holders and that the King would grant dispensations to those he wished to employ who would not take the required oaths. It concluded by saying that the King expected parliament to give legal sanction to this toleration when he thought it convenient for it to meet.⁸³

In 1689 the Declaration of Rights unequivocally declared that the suspending power was illegal. Modern historians, however, have claimed that James's Indulgence was technically within the law. There are two strands to the argument. The first is that the English monarch, by dint of the royal supremacy, did have the power to suspend penal laws in matters of religion; it is true that the Commons had issued a resolution against the suspending power in 1673, when it had forced Charles II to withdraw his Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, but resolutions of the Commons, it has rightly been pointed out, do not make law. The second is that James did not strictly speaking claim a suspending power,’ but instead saw his Indulgence as resting on the dispensing power, for which he had legal sanction by dint of the verdict in Godden v. Hales.⁸⁴ The second point can be easily dealt with. While contemporaries often did speak of the Indulgence as resting upon the ‘dispensing power’, they certainly understood the difference between dispensing individuals from the penalties of particular laws and dispensing with (that is, suspending) the operation of an entire statute. The Indulgence itself clearly distinguished between suspending the penal laws and granting individuals dispensations from the Test, even if it did not speak explicitly about a ‘suspending power’. In a tract published in 1688, Lord Chief Justice Herbert, the judge who had given the ruling in Godden v. Hales, forthrightly asserted that the Declaration of Indulgence was based on the suspending power, which was entirely different from the dispensing power.⁸⁵ The first point is a little more complicated, and hinges upon the legal significance of Charles II's withdrawing his Indulgence of 1673. The important thing to recognize, however, is that the Commons in 1673 did not declare the suspending power to be illegal; rather, the lower house insisted that Charles withdraw his Indulgence because, they claimed, the King was mistaken in his belief that he enjoyed the power to suspend penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical. Charles's withdrawal, in other words, seemed a tacit acknowledgement by the King that the English sovereign had never possessed such a power.⁸⁶

A number of contemporaries explicitly condemned James's attempt to suspend the penal laws in 1687. One pamphleteer acknowledged that the king did possess a dispensing power, but only to correct faults in the law: ‘If any thing happen[ed] after the making of a Law, which was not foreseen when it was made’ or was ‘contrary to the original intention of the Law-makers’, and rendered ‘the execution of the Law manifestly and notoriously oppressive to the Public’, then the sovereign might ‘certainly suspend the Execution’ of such a law until it was ‘alter'd or repealed by the Power which made them’ (namely parliament). But this ‘must be for the publick good’, this author insisted, ‘or else it is the abuse, not the natural Right of Soveraign Power’.⁸⁷ Similarly, Robert Ferguson wrote that although everyone acknowledged that there was ‘a Royal prerogative setled on the Crown’, to apply it beyond ‘the received Customes’ of the nation ‘and the universal good, preservation and safety of the People in general’ was ‘an Usurpation and Tyranny in the Ruler’. Only parliament, Ferguson claimed, could determine the extent of the prerogative: one could not accept the opinion of the king's advisers, ‘Mercinary lawyers’, or ‘Sycophantic Clergy-men’, since they were hardly likely to be unbiased. So ‘a Power arising from Royal prerogative to suspend and disable a great number of Laws at once’ – laws, moreover, designed for ‘the great security of the people… which the whole Community represented in Parliaments have often made void Princes medling with’ – was ‘a changing of the Government’, Ferguson alleged, ‘and an overthrowing of the Constitution’.⁸⁸ Burnet similarly agreed that ‘the King's suspending of Laws’ struck ‘at the root of this whole Government’ and quite subverted it. Even ‘the most obsequious and servile Parliament to the Court that ever England knew’ (i.e. Charles II's Cavalier Parliament of 1661–79), he wrote elsewhere, ‘not only denied this Prerogative to the late King, but made him renounce it by revoking his Declaration of Indulgence’ of 1672.⁸⁹

James was aware that his policy was controversial and that the benefits of the Indulgence would have to be sold to the English public. He had also seen how his brother's regime, in response to the Exclusionist challenge, had successfully used the press to defend its record and to convince people to stop supporting the Whigs and to rally behind the crown. The people could, in other words, be won over to a cause they might not instinctively support; James's own present occupancy of the throne was proof of that. The secret was knowing how to go about it. One could follow the logic of high Tory-Anglican ideology as espoused during the years of the Tory Reaction: if the king was indeed an absolute monarch who was above the law, then of course he had the power to suspend the penal laws, especially when he thought that doing so was in the best interests of his people. Several anonymous tracts appeared defending the Indulgence along precisely those lines. James also had the services of that diehard Anglican-Royalist and genius of Charles II's propaganda campaign Sir Roger L'Estrange, who was still producing his bi-weekly pro-government periodical the Observator, and who, from late 1686, began churning out defences of the monarch's right not only to dispense with the law but even to suspend the entire operation of certain laws. Yet James also needed to try to win over the dissenters. To this end he recruited the services of the erstwhile Whig publicist Henry Care, and the Quaker William Penn to produce defences of the royal pursuit of religious toleration, in an effort to appeal to Whig and non-conformist sensibilities.⁹⁰

In trying to sell James's Indulgence, propagandists sought to make the case both that the King had the power to issue a general edict of toleration and that it was in the best interests of the nation for him to do so. Although the English Declaration, unlike the Scottish Declaration, had not explicitly justified the crown's ability to suspend the laws by claiming that the king of England was an absolute monarch, a number of defenders of the Indulgence were quick to make that assertion. For L'Estrange, ‘Imperial Princes’ were ‘Absolute… and Immediately under God’ and ‘To him Alone… Accountable’; the laws were ‘the Kings Laws’, and although there were ‘Many Political Laws’, which a prince could not depart from, ‘without being Manifestly Guilty before God’, there were ‘Other Cases… that would make him Culpable before God, if he did not Break them’.⁹¹ Yet L'Estrange, who had spent much of his career in journalism calling for the strict enforcement of the penal laws against religious nonconformists, was finding it a strain to sustain public credibility and, with his health beginning to fail, he ceased writing the Observator in March 1687. He later denied that this was because things had not gone his way: everything he had written about toleration, he insisted, had ‘not been made a Question of Religion, but of Government’, the main point of debate being ‘Whether Liberty of Conscience be a… Right of the People, or an Act of Grace, and Indulgence, Issuing from the Prerogative of the Supreme Magistrate’.⁹² One anonymous author insisted that ‘by the antient Laws of this Realm’, England was ‘an absolute Empire, and Monarchy’, where the king was ‘furnished with plenary and Entire Power, Prerogative and Jurisdiction’, and tried to show that generations of Anglican divines, from Archbishops Bancroft and Laud through to Dr William Sherlock, had accepted that the king had the power to dispense with the penal laws. Curiously, however, this author concluded by insisting that ‘Liberty of Conscience’ was ‘a Natural Right’, not an ‘Act of Grace’ from the crown.⁹³ Similarly, William Penn argued that the most venerable of the Church of England's own clergy had acknowledged that power in ecclesiastical affairs rested wholly and absolutely in the crown.⁹⁴

Authors also emphasized the positive benefits of toleration. One poem, licensed for publication two weeks before the Indulgence was issued, predicted:

Holland no longer shall our people drain,
No more our wealthy manufactures gain;
Henceforth rebellion can have no pretense
To arm the rabble for their faith's defense.
Since each mode of religion now is free,
They'll all, I hope, conspire in loyalty.95

A tract, purportedly written by a minister of the Church of England, insisted that persecution did not work, since men could ‘not be frighted or aw'd out of their Opinions’, and that the experience of other states, such as Holland and Poland, proved that toleration promoted peace at home and encouraged trade.⁹⁶ Penn made similar points concerning trade and domestic peace, and went so far as to suggest that if the King had declared for liberty of conscience earlier there would have been no Monmouth rebellion. He also wondered why any man's religious affiliation should ‘hinder him from serving the Country of his Birth’.⁹⁷ Most writers, in addition, pointed out that members of the Established Church should have nothing to fear from the Indulgence, because of the King's promise to maintain and protect the Church of England.⁹⁸

Finding it in their Hearts to Thank the King

James believed all religious groups would see that they benefited from the Indulgence and expected his subjects to respond with addresses of thanks – although the rumour that he had ordered the payment of large sums of money to those who were willing to make such addresses was probably not true.⁹⁹ Eventually 200 addresses came in from various groups throughout the kingdom: Catholics, dissenters, the clergy, local authorities and various trading interests. The total fell well short of the 346 addresses from England and Wales congratulating him on his accession. Moreover, many were slow to come in: only seventy-nine had been received by mid-August (prior to James setting out on a progress to the West Midlands on 16 August to drum up support for his policies); thirty-three in fact were not to be announced until the New Year, although many of the later ones were also able to promise to support the return of MPs who favoured the repeal of the penal laws (following the dissolution of parliament in July 1687) and to congratulate James on his wife's pregnancy (announced in December). A closer exploration of the history of these addresses – both of how they were drawn up and how they were worded – however, reveals considerable opposition to the Indulgence in many parts of the country, especially from Anglican interests.

The Catholics were naturally delighted with the Indulgence. At the end of May Lord Arundell presented an address of thanks to the King on behalf of the Roman Catholics of the kingdom, signed by several lords and many gentlemen of quality, while in August the Catholics of Lancashire, headed by Lord Molyneux, presented their own address to James while he was on his tour of the West Midlands.¹⁰⁰ These were the only two addresses, however, to be delivered in the name of English Catholics; there were not, after all, that many English Catholics who could have addressed.

The response of the nonconformists to the Indulgence was complex. After years of suffering under the weight of the law, most were happy to avail themselves of the relief the Indulgence afforded. Many, nevertheless, remained suspicious of James's motives and concerned by the fact that the toleration was dependent upon the King's arbitrary will and lacked any legal basis. The Presbyterians were the most hesitant. The Governor of York Sir John Reresby observed that in York, Leeds and Sheffield, the ‘Geneva Party’ chose to stick by the Church of England and continued to go to church; only the Quakers and Independents, who were not particularly numerous in this area, showed any sign that they were pleased with the toleration.¹⁰¹ In London, one observer noted that, the week before the Indulgence was issued, the churches were more crowded than ever, the conventiclers saying they would rather ‘now stay there then return’.¹⁰² The Presbyterian preacher Daniel Williams told a meeting of London dissenting ministers that ‘it was better for them to be reduced to their former hardships, than declare for measures destructive of the liberties of their country’ and convinced them not to present an address of thanks. Likewise, the Baptist minister William Kiffin persuaded his followers not to address.¹⁰³ However, some dissenters, in different parts of the country, did welcome the Indulgence. One correspondent from the diocese of Norwich informed Archbishop Sancroft in late April how ‘our dissenters have greedily swallowed the bayt and every where expressed their Joy with bells and bonfiers’. In Norwich itself, Dr John Collins immediately opened up a meeting of Presbyterians and Independents, and began boasting to the city's clergy that he now stood ‘upon a levell with them’ and would rather have ‘the kindnesse of the Indulgence’ than submit to the unreasonable terms of the Church of England, although the Bishop of Norwich believed that Collins was ‘not much to be regarded’, since many of his erstwhile followers had deserted him and rejoined the Established Church.¹⁰⁴ In the west of England, meetings were soon ‘very many and full’, while elsewhere we learn how dissenters rushed to ‘repair, beautify and adorn their meeting-houses with great diligence’.¹⁰⁵ One Welsh Baptist praised James as ‘an instrument in God's hand to give us a lovely, likeable freedom by a strong unshakable declaration’. ¹⁰⁶

A total of 78 addresses came in from various nonconformist groups throughout England and Wales: 4 from Quakers; 8 from Baptists (or Anabaptists); 10 from Congregationalists; 11 from Presbyterians; 1 jointly from the Independents, Baptists and others of Gloucestershire; 43 from people who simply identified themselves as dissenters or nonconformists; and 1 from those who had been ‘in Arms against your Majesty’ (presumably Monmouth rebels).¹⁰⁷ The first to come in was in the name of the Anabaptists in and about London.¹⁰⁸ William Penn, by now a government agent, presented an address signed by about 800 London Quakers towards the end of April, and another a month later in the name of all ‘Quakers in this Kingdom’ agreed to by their yearly meeting, before then embarking on a preaching tour through England to promote the King's Indulgence.¹⁰⁹ James also secured the services of the Presbyterian divines Vincent Alsop and Thomas Rosewell, and the Independent Stephen Lobb, to act as agents to solicit addresses from dissenters in London by offering pardons for their previous offences. On Thursday 28 April, Rosewell presented an address in the name of the Presbyterian ministers of London, but only nine ministers subscribed. Two days later, Lobb presented an address from the Independents, signed again by just 9 ministers and about 140 laymen.¹¹⁰ Employing a looseness in his use of rhetoric, which revealed that he did not quite get some of the basic points of English constitutionalism, James told the Presbyterian ministers who delivered their address ‘that he hoped they now had a Magna Charta for the exercise of their religion, the same as there was for the preservation of every one's estate’.¹¹¹ Legal rights wrought from the crown and enshrined in a charter that was subsequently confirmed by parliament, it should go without saying, were clearly somewhat different from a liberty based on a declaration founded upon the royal prerogative!

Some of the addresses were a long time coming. Only forty-three had come in by mid-August; the dissenting ministers of Leicestershire did not present theirs until mid-December.¹¹² A few addresses were fulsome in their praise for what James had done. The dissenting ministers of west Somerset thanked James ‘for the Liberty we enjoy by that Soveraign Act of Grace’, and prayed that his reign might ‘be long and prosperous’ and ‘the Glory of it’ remembered ‘to all Generations’.¹¹³ The Norwich congregationalists claimed that, contrary to popular belief, they had always been in favour of monarchy, which they thought was ‘the only ancient, legal, and rightful Government of this Nation’ and also ‘the best Government’, adding – in an echo of the patriarchalist language deployed by Cavalier Anglicans under Charles II – that a king was the ‘common Father of all his People’ who cares ‘for the good of all’.¹¹⁴ The Presbyterians of both Norwich and Macclesfield embraced the idea of the divine right of kings by stating in their addresses that they also owed thanks to God, ‘By Whom Kings Reign’.¹¹⁵ Yet most nonconformist addresses were cautiously worded, and James was reportedly disappointed that the dissenters in general merely thanked him for granting them liberty, without declaring in favour of ‘the Dispensing power’.¹¹⁶

It was the response of the Anglican clergy that proved most disappointing to the crown. On 20 April Sunderland informed the bishops of Durham, Rochester, Peterborough, Oxford and Chester ‘it would be acceptable to the Court’ if they made ‘a Congratulatory Address’ of thanks for the declaration, and particularly for the King's ‘renewed assurance’ to ‘protect them in their Religion and Liberties’, and produced a text to this effect for them to sign. The bishops of Durham, Oxford and Chester immediately agreed. Thomas Sprat of Rochester at first begged to be excused, though eventually he concurred. Thomas White of Peterborough openly condemned the Declaration, saying ‘that he did not thinke the Church of England had received any advantage but a great prejudice by it’ and predicted that none of the London clergy would sign. Indeed, most of the London clergy, ‘both the Hierarchists, and the moderator sort’, did refuse. The Bishop of Lincoln wanted to support the address, but the clergy of London wrote to his archdeacons and urged them not to concur. Cartwright of Chester, who owed his elevation to James and who was fully behind the King's policy, had problems getting his own clergy to fall in line. One protested that rather than protecting the Church, the King had ‘let loose all our enemies upon us’; another ‘that he would never thank the King for breaking the Lawes’. Even when the four bishops redrafted the address, so that it gave thanks only for the promise to protect the Church, the London clergy still refused to sign.¹¹⁷

With it being impossible to secure the support of the Church as a whole, the bishops in favour of addressing had no option but to go their separate ways. When Parker of Oxford tried to promote his own address, all but one of his clergy refused to sign. They spelled out their reasons in a detailed paper, which circulated in manuscript. Thanking the King for continuing them in their possessions, they insisted, was ‘but our Thanks for his Majestie's continuing our Legal Rights: which either equally concerns all States of Men in the Kingdom, and ought properly be considered in parliament; or else it supposeth our possessions less Legal, and more arbitrary, than other Subjects'. As for the King's promise to maintain them in ‘the free Exercise of our Religion’, they continued, this ‘necessarily heards us among the various Sects under Toleration… depending for protection upon no legal Establishment, but entirely upon soverain pleasure and Indulgence, which at pleasure is revocable’. And why should the clergy give thanks to the King for abrogating the laws for the dissenters' sake, laws which, they opined, ‘perhaps cannot be repealed’.¹¹⁸

Of the five bishops Sunderland had initially approached, only two – Durham and Chester – presented addresses from their diocesan clergy. The King received that from Durham at the end of May, but was clearly disappointed, saying he expected it ‘sooner’ and to be ‘much fuller’.¹¹⁹ The dioceses of Coventry and Lichfield, Lincoln and St David's also produced addresses of thanks, as did the dean and chapter of the collegiate church of Ripon, making a grand total of six from the Anglican clergy (or seven if we include an address from the magistrates and clergy of the Isle of Guernsey, delivered in February 1688).¹²⁰ As one pamphleteer later complained, ‘scarce any’ of the Church of England men ‘could find in [their] hearts to thank the King at all’, and ‘those Few’ that did, ‘proceeded so Awkwardly in their Acknowledgements’, as to thank the King not ‘for the Main Scope of His Healing Declaration’, but only for that part relating to the Church, so as to render the addresses ‘of very little value’.¹²¹

Eighty-eight addresses were presented in the name of counties, grand juries, towns, corporations or local inhabitants. Certainly some groups were willing to offer the sort of fulsome thanks that must have pleased the government. The lawyers of the Middle Temple thought they had particular reason to thank the King for the honour he had done them in asserting his royal prerogatives, which were ‘the very life of the Law, and our own Profession’ and ‘must always remain entire’, since they ‘were given by God himself’.¹²²L'Estrange was a notable enthusiast, proclaiming at a specially convened meeting at Sam's coffee house in London on 7 May that ‘we Loyall men of the Church of England did alwayes acknowledge and aver the King to be above the Laws’ and exhorting those present to sign a congratulatory address.¹²³ A closer examination of this category of addresses, however, reveals deep divisions in many communities over the Indulgence. In Devon, a JP by the name of Bear, ‘a most fervent man for delivering up of Charters and encourageing Informers’ under Charles II, proposed at the county sessions that ‘the high loyall Church of England-men’ should deliver a congratulatory address, but the local JPs were divided in their response; those that opposed the idea withdrew, leaving those who remained to draw up an address.¹²⁴ At Bath, the high steward, mayor, aldermen and capital citizens drew up a cautiously worded address, which started by reminding James that they had given him thanks at his accession for his promise to protect their religion, rights and properties and had defended the city against the Monmouth rebellion, before going on to thank the King again not only for his ‘Gracious Favour to us for the enjoying our Religion’, but also for his ‘Mercy, Clemency and Goodness in pardoning [his] greatest Enemies’, in the hope that this might ‘cure their distracted Minds’. At the same time, several members of the corporation and other freemen and inhabitants presented a more fulsome address, in which they expressed a desire to cast themselves at the King's sacred feet ‘with all the Dutifull and Loyal deference unto Your Royal Pleasure, and undoubted Prerogative in publishing Your late Gracious Declaration’.¹²⁵ In a number of towns and boroughs, local inhabitants drew up their own addresses because the corporation itself failed to do so. Thus the Gloucester address was delivered in the name of several of the aldermen, common councilmen, gentlemen and burgesses, on behalf on themselves and several hundred freemen of the city, while that from Coventry came from the citizens and inhabitants.¹²⁶

Some local leaders tried to avoid subscribing without appearing to be against the idea of addressing. When asked by the high sheriff of Yorkshire if he would help frame and present an address from the ‘Church of England Gentlemen’ of the county, Reresby claimed that he was so tied up with the King's business that he would be late getting to the York assizes, where the matter was being discussed. As it turned out, very few of the local gentry made it to the assizes, and those who did were not inclined to comply with the sheriff. Some Catholics and a few Protestants who had special reasons to give thanks (presumably nonconformists) did suggest framing an address from the grand jury, but they could not agree on the wording. In the end, no address came from Yorkshire at this time, and Reresby, who finally did make it to the assizes, managed to emerge blameless.¹²⁷ Others had the courage of their convictions. The sub-recorder of Exeter, a man who under Charles II had been very active in promoting anti-Whig addresses, was removed from office for speaking ‘very unmannerly and scandalously of his Majesties Declaration and Addresses’.¹²⁸ Exeter, for the time being, declined to address. The mayor and the recorder led the opposition to addressing in Totnes; the former was discharged, the latter suspended.¹²⁹ The corporation of Leicester decided by a vote of thirty-five to nineteen to reject a proposed address, even after the mayor had modified the wording suggested by the town's absentee recorder, the Earl of Huntingdon, in the hope of making it more acceptable. The sticking point was over the inclusion of any reference to the Indulgence: a majority would have been willing to support an address ‘with Relation only to the Church of England’, but Huntingdon's man on the ground feared that this would ‘not find a good acceptance from the King’.¹³⁰

The Lord Mayor and aldermen of London did send in an address of thanks in October, but only because the government had removed seven Tory aldermen that summer for opposing an address, replacing them with Whigs, and appointed a nonconformist lord mayor, Sir John Shorter.¹³¹ Indeed, it was not until after James had conducted a further purge of local office-holders in late 1687 and early 1688 that some communities could be induced to thank the crown for the Indulgence. The corporation of Gloucester finally delivered an address in January 1688, following a purge the previous November.¹³² The grand inquest for Staffordshire did not draw up their address until 3 April 1688, but insisted that such ‘lateness’ should ‘not be attributed to want of Loyalty’, since this was ‘the first opportunity the Body of the County could be prevailed on, having hitherto been detained from Paying its Duty by an over-ruling Party among us’. The address went on to thank the King for his ‘Indulgent Distribution of [his] Dispensing Power’.¹³³ The mayor, aldermen, bailiffs and citizens of Carlisle drew up their address in April 1688, ‘being now at Liberty, by the late Regulation made here’, to offer their ‘late, but unfeigned Thanks’. Thanks to the late regulation, it should be pointed out, the mayor of Carlisle was now a Catholic.¹³⁴ It took two purges – in November 1687 and February 1688 – before the corporation of Banbury agreed to address on 22 February 1688; there had been an address from Banbury the previous September, but without official backing, having been delivered simply in the name of the freemen of the borough.¹³⁵ Similarly, it took a series of purges from the summer of 1687 to the spring of 1688 to induce Scarborough and Totnes to address, which they eventually agreed to do in late April 1688.¹³⁶ The mayor, aldermen, bailiffs and burgesses of Newcastle under Lyme addressed twice: the first in June 1687, giving thanks for James's promise to protect the Church of England and expressing the hope that the King would find as ‘much Faith and Sincerity’ from those whom the toleration benefited; the second in January 1688, following a purge the previous month, proclaiming that the Indulgence had ‘fully answered us in the desires of our Heart’ and promising to endeavour to return MPs who would support a parliamentary repeal of the penal laws.¹³⁷

A further twenty-six addresses were presented in the names of particular trading interests across the kingdom – nineteen from London livery companies,¹³⁸ plus others from the master builders and related traders and craftsmen in and about London, the clothiers of Stroud-Water (Gloucestershire) and Worcester, the goldsmiths of Hull, the seamen of Hull, the merchants of Exeter, and the serge manufacturers of Taunton. The last rejoiced that James had freed them ‘from the rapacious Hands of those that made a Prey of our very Labour, and raised their own private Fortunes on that which should have fed our Wives and Children’, and predicted that now the interest of parties had been ‘laid aside, the Common Interest, Trade and Safety of the Nation may be advanc'd and promoted by All’.¹³⁹ The numbers were hardly overwhelming; indeed, those from the London livery companies came only as a result of government-orchestrated purges.

THE ATTACK ON THE ANGLICAN MONOPOLY OF EDUCATION

In order to provide more Catholic priests and encourage further conversions, James needed to break the Anglican monopoly of education. He thought it unfair, as a matter of principle, that Catholics should be denied access to public schools and universities, but he also appeared to believe that the mere presence of Catholics would encourage secret sympathizers at such institutions openly to acknowledge their preference for Catholicism and that the open debate that would ensue between Protestants and Catholics would convince others of the merits of converting.¹⁴⁰ At every step of the way, however, he met opposition from Tory-Anglican interests who believed that the King was acting in violation of the law and that they were bound not to assist the King in his illegal acts.

In January 1687 James recommended to the governors of Charterhouse that they elect a Catholic to a scholarship, and Lord Chancellor Jeffreys produced a royal dispensation on the young man's behalf. However, most of the governors, spearheaded by the Earl of Danby, and backed by Ormonde, Halifax and Archbishop Sancroft, refused to countenance the election; Danby even stated that he thought ‘the power of Dispenceing… to be illegal’, and that he found the judges' opinion in Godden v. Hales ‘to be thought unwarrantable by the Lawes of England, and by the generallity of the best Lawyers’.¹⁴¹ In this case, the school governors successfully stood their ground.

James proved more determined with regard to the universities, though he ran into the same kind of difficulties. In March 1686 he granted dispensations to four Oxford academics who had converted to Catholicism (Dr Obadiah Walker and two other fellows of University College and a fellow of Brasenose) so that they would not have to resign their fellowships.¹⁴² James made a bolder move the following October, when he appointed the ‘popishly-affected’ John Massey, a client of Walker's, to the vacant position of Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and dispensed him from coming to prayers, receiving the sacrament, taking all oaths, and performing the religious duties normally required of the dean. Nevertheless, the right to appoint the dean was in the gift of the crown, and Massey might not have been a declared Catholic at the time of his appointment (though he was certainly regarded as one by early 1687).¹⁴³

James was on more controversial ground when he decided to appoint Joshua Bassett, a Catholic convert, master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in January 1687. The Duke of Albemarle, as chancellor of the university, wrote to the King and asked him to allow the college to choose their own master, as his royal predecessors had done, informing him that the fellows were obliged by their statutes, upon oath, to choose a Protestant of the Established Church. James replied that he had already given his mandate to Bassett and could not revoke it. When Bassett came to be admitted at the end of the month, the fellows accepted his mandate and dispensation, but another impediment soon emerged. Sidney Sussex had been an Elizabethan foundation, and by the terms of its statues the fellows were sworn to admit no one as master unless he took an oath promising to uphold the true religion against papistry. Since Bassett had no dispensation from this oath, the fellows decided they could not admit him. The case dragged on, and in March some of the fellows presented a petition to the King asking him ‘to withdraw his commands because they were against the Colledge statutes’. The fellows were summoned before the Ecclesiastical Commission and they eventually backed down.¹⁴⁴

In February 1687 James sent a mandate to the vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Dr John Peachell, to admit Father Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, to an MA, and another Catholic to the degree of Doctor of Physic, without administering any oaths. Peachell called a special congregation of the heads of house, where all but three agreed it would be ‘utterly inconsistent with their oaths and with the statutes of the University’ to comply with the King's request. James reissued his mandate; the vice-chancellor again refused to admit the pair, having been informed by two prominent jurists, Sir Francis Pemberton and Heneage Finch, that the King's mandate could have no effect and that the admitter could be fined for breach of trust if he violated the acts of parliament stipulating the oaths. The vice-chancellor and eight specially elected deputies of the University were therefore summoned to appear before the Ecclesiastical Commission that spring, where they protested that they were bound by their oaths, under penalty of law, to administer the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and the Test to all graduates, and challenged the right of the Ecclesiastical Commission to hear their case on the grounds that all such courts had been abolished in 1641. The commissioners decided to make an example of Peachell and deprived him of all his offices and benefices, though James let the deputies off the hook, for fear of turning them into martyrs.¹⁴⁵

James's most controversial step was his attack on Magdalen College, the richest college in Oxford. On the death of its president at the end of March 1687, James decided to seek the election of a crypto-Catholic, Anthony Farmer. However, the right of election lay in the College and by the terms of the College statues the fellows were obliged to chose a Protestant of good character who had at one time held a fellowship either at Magdalen or at New College. Although he had yet to declare himself a Catholic, Farmer associated himself with known Catholics in the university (such as Dr Obadiah Walker) and the fellows suspected he was no longer an Anglican. Nor did he meet the fellowship requirement. He was also a notorious drunkard and womanizer, having been known to make women ‘Dance naked before him’; on one occasion, it emerged, he had ‘Kisst… and tongu'd’ a woman, on another he had ‘putt his hands under a Faire Ladye's Coates’. On hearing of James's intention, the fellows petitioned the King (on 9 April) to inform him that Farmer was unqualified, and asked that James either let them make their own choice or recommend a more suitable candidate. Two days later, however, the fellows received a mandate from the King (dated 5 April) requiring them to elect Farmer forthwith and dispensing him from any statutes or customs barring his election. The fellows assumed that the King had been misinformed both about Farmer and of his own rights to dispose of the presidency, and since the College statutes required that a new election be made within fifteen days, in default of an answer to their own petition they proceeded on 15 April to elect Mr John Hough, an existing fellow.¹⁴⁶

James was furious and instructed the Ecclesiastical Commission to proceed against the fellows. The case was heard in June. In their written plea, the fellows explained that their college statutes and oaths not only obliged them to elect a duly qualified person but also forbade them from consenting to any dispensation. They further pointed out that the King had no right to require them to elect Farmer, since ‘the right of Election’ was ‘in themselves’. Having deferred the election to the last day possible, to give the King a chance to recommend a duly qualified person, they at last elected Hough, in accordance with the procedures outlined in their statues. The commissioners determined that Hough's election was void, though even they had to accept that Farmer was ineligible, especially once their own enquiries revealed him to be ‘a very bad man’.¹⁴⁷

On 14 August James therefore issued another mandate, with the same dispensation as the last, this time requiring the fellows to elect Bishop Parker of Oxford as president, even though Parker had also never held a fellowship at Magdalen or New College. The fellows persisted, however, in maintaining that Hough's election was valid. James visited Oxford on 4 September and ordered the fellows to admit the bishop; the fellows replied that although ‘they were as ready to obey his Majesty in all things that lay in their power… the Electing of the Bishop of Oxford being directly contrary to their Statutes, and to the positive Oaths they had taken, they could not apprehend it in their power to obey him in this matter’. As the vice-chancellor of the university pointed out to the King the next day, if they did the fellows would be guilty of ‘the heinous sin of perjury’: ‘We must observe our Statutes, being obliged thereunto by Oath’, which ‘no power under heaven can dispense with’. In mid-October the King appointed a commission, headed by Bishop Cartwright of Chester, to carry out a visitation of the College; all but three of the fellows persisted in their refusal to recognize Parker as their president, and were deprived of their fellowships. James appointed a number of Catholics as their replacements.¹⁴⁸

The Magdalen College affair again raised the issue of the scope of the dispensing power. Government propagandists, naturally, insisted that the fellows should have obeyed the King's mandate to elect the Bishop of Oxford, on the reasoning that the dispensation took away the force of the College statutes and freed them from their oath to make an election in accordance with them.¹⁴⁹ Yet the ruling in Godden v. Hales had made it clear that the king's dispensing power applied only to mala prohibita (and only then when the dispensation did not intrude on the rights of a third party); perjury was malum in se, a crime against God, and therefore no king could dispense his subjects from the obligation to keep their solemnly sworn oaths. Revealingly, even Lord Chief Justice Herbert, the man who had given the ruling in Godden v. Hales, believed that the royal dispensation in the Magdalen College affair was invalid, ‘because there was a particular Right and Interest vested in the Members of that Colledge… of Choosing their own Head’.¹⁵⁰

The residents of Oxford were far from pleased with James's efforts to Catholicize the university. When Walker first started holding mass at University College, in the late summer of 1686, a crowd of people assembled outside the College gates making ‘cries and shouts’ to disrupt the service, until some of the soldiers who were attending mass came out to disperse them. On other occasions Walker (soon nicknamed ‘Obadiah Ave-Maria’) found his chapel invaded by Protestant scholars, who protested when he threw them out: ‘wee do not keep you out of our Chapels and Churches… why should you from yours?’ In late July 1688 a boy turned up at Walker's chapel with a cat under his coat, which he proceeded to pinch and pull by the tail during the service so the cat produced ‘such an untunable noise’ that it created ‘some disorder’, until the celebrants realized what was going on and chased the youth out of the building. When the vice-president of Magdalen, Dr Robert Charnock, announced in January 1688 that mass would now be said in chapel, the local townsfolk began turning up on Sundays in larger numbers than usual to try to prevent it. In this they had the support of the College's president, the Bishop of Oxford. It was not until Parker's death in March and his replacement as president by the popish titular bishop Dr Bonaventure Gifford that Charnock was able to secure Magdalen chapel for Catholic worship. Determined not to let the Catholics have an easy ride, the Protestant men and women of the town would turn up at mass ‘to grin and sneare’. The Catholic fellows found that when out in the town the students would pull faces at them and call them ‘ill names’; in hall, the students would sit with their hats on as an act of defiance and then drink healths to the confusion of the Pope after the fellows had left high table.¹⁵¹

THE CAMPAIGN TO PACK PARLIAMENT

By the summer of 1687 James finally reached the conclusion that it would be impossible to secure the repeal of the penal laws and the Tests from his present parliament. He therefore issued a proclamation dissolving parliament on 2 July¹⁵² and set about trying to secure the return of one that would be favourable to his wishes. To gauge the mood of the country, he made another progress, this time through the West Midlands, leaving Windsor on 16 August, travelling to Portsmouth, Bath, Gloucester, Worcester, Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Whitchurch, and on up to Chester, then returning via Newport, Lichfield, Coventry, Banbury, Oxford and Cirencester before ending back at Bath on 6 September. The London Gazette predictably portrayed the progress as a great success, charting the enthusiastic reception James received wherever he went.¹⁵³ Local accounts confirm that the royal visit provided an occasion for festive display and general merriment. At Coventry, for example, the King was treated to a splendid civic reception, the locals were out in force to cheer him as he processed through the city, and the night of his stay saw bonfires ‘through the wholl Citie’.¹⁵⁴ Nevertheless, some local observers sensed that all was not as it should have been. At Oxford, both the University and the corporation laid on an elaborate reception, and when the King entered town ‘all the streets… were most infinitely crowded with all sorts of people, and all windows fild with faces, who made great acclamations and shouts’; Anthony Wood noted ominously, however, that there were no cries of ‘Vivat Rex’, or long live the king, ‘as the antient manner was’. At Banbury James was assailed by a mastiff dog as he progressed through the streets; the King drew a pistol and shot the animal dead, but the noise of the gunshot so startled the Earl of Abingdon's horse that it threw its rider to the ground, leaving the Earl seriously hurt. The episode has an air of farce about it; certainly it must have detracted from the dignity of the occasion.¹⁵⁵

James used the tour to promote the benefits of his toleration to local leaders and to make the case for a parliamentary repeal of the penal laws and Tests. In this he thought he had been successful: as the Jacobite Life put it, ‘the kind and affable reception’ the gentry afforded him convinced him that he ‘had gain'd in some manner upon their stubborn temper’, while ‘the awful presence of a Sovereign imposed such veneration upon the generality of the people where he pass'd, that their joyfull acclamations and dutifull acknowlidgments seem'd to be pledg's of their complyance’.¹⁵⁶ The progress did prompt the submission of more addresses of thanks for the Indulgence, some of which combined promises to seek the return of MPs who would support toleration in parliament: of the 33 addresses that came in during the period from 16 August to 17 September, 18 were the result of pressures brought to bear during the King's progress.¹⁵⁷ Some places, however, resisted all pressure to address. Of the 15 major towns and cities James visited, 3 (Chester, Coventry and Gloucester) had presented some form of address prior to the progress; 8 (Bristol, Cirencester, Lichfield, Newport, Oxford, Shrewsbury, Whitchurch and Worcester) were never to present any address; 1 (Portsmouth) did not address until the new year, following further purges of the corporations; leaving only 3 (Banbury, Bath and Ludlow) who presented some form of address that could be said to have been prompted by the royal progress. Halifax thought the progress did not give James ‘any great encouragement’ with regard to his schemes for toleration, since it had ‘grown into a point of honour, universally received by the nation, not to change their opinion’.¹⁵⁸

To obtain a detailed assessment of the degree of support that existed for a parliamentary toleration, James decided at the end of October 1687 to carry out an extensive poll of all holders of court office, members of the recently dissolved parliament, JPs, deputy Lieutenants, office-holders in the corporations, members of the London livery companies and other minor officials. Three standard questions were to be put to each individual: would they support the repeal of the penal laws and Tests, if elected to parliament; would they help secure the return of MPs who would support a repeal; and would they support the Indulgence by living in peace with those of all religious persuasions? The task of polling the county and urban magistracy fell to the Lord Lieutenants, yet despite a purge of the lieutenancy that summer, many proved far from enthusiastic about carrying out the poll, and either dragged their feet or put their questions in such a way as to discourage positive answers. Further dismissals followed in the autumn and winter: by March 1688, 19 new men had been appointed, 13 of whom were Roman Catholics, and only 14 from the previous summer had managed to retain their posts. When the answers eventually started coming in – and some areas were very late in reporting back – they were far from encouraging. Most of those polled had no trouble promising to live in peace with those of different religious persuasions, but many of the replies to the first two questions were evasive, qualified, or even hostile. All told, just under 27 per cent of the JPs polled answered ‘yes’ to the repeal of the penal laws and Tests (though this figure includes Catholics), just over 27 per cent ‘no’, 28 per cent expressed doubts or reservations, while 18 per cent were absent when the poll was being conducted in their area or else had no answer recorded. If we restrict ourselves to the Protestants polled, we find that just over 16 per cent answered ‘yes’ and nearly 34 per cent ‘no’.¹⁵⁹

Contemporaries recognized that the poll had been a major public relations disaster, so general and so public had the ‘non-concurrence’ been.¹⁶⁰ ‘Before this Inquiry’, the Imperial ambassador wrote in April 1688, ‘everyone suspected his neighbour of being a partisan of the King and people suppressed their disaffection, which now they express without fear’.¹⁶¹ Moreover, the results were perhaps predictable, given the fact that most local office-holders were still Tory Anglicans. James now embarked on a wholescale purge of local office-holders. At the end of 1687, a board of regulators set about considering the county commissions of the peace. By late July 1688 all but five counties in England and Wales had received new commissions, with Catholics, dissenters and former Whigs replacing those who had been unwilling to commit themselves to James's scheme for toleration. One third of the deputy Lieutenants and one fifth of the JPs were now Catholics – an extraordinary number, given the small proportion of the population of England and Wales who were of the Catholic faith, and which had been achieved only by including those whose social status would not normally have entitled them to a position on the bench. It was the Anglican squires who lost out: some three-quarters of those who had been JPs in 1685 were no longer on the bench.¹⁶² The Lord Lieutenants, their deputies and the local JPs normally carried considerable electoral influence, especially if they came from the traditional shire elite. Yet James's newly appointed men scarcely possessed the prestige and local standing necessary to carry the shires on behalf of the crown, which were, in any case, notoriously difficult to control, given the size of their electorates.

James realized that his best chance of securing a compliant parliament lay in gaining control over the urban electorate. He began with London. Having intruded a nonconformist Lord Mayor, Sir John Shorter, in August 1687, in September and October he carried out a purge of the London livery companies (who comprised the City's electorate). This resulted in the dismissal of 17 masters, 58 wardens, 79 assistants and 1,795 liverymen, including most of ‘the violent tories’; James replaced them with those removed during the remodelling of 1684–5, among them many dissenters, who were given dispensations from the requisite oaths. Even so, the remodelling did not meet expectations, and James needed to undertake a second purge in February 1688, when he dismissed a further 8 masters, 15 wardens, 194 assistants and 656 liverymen, replacing them with 328 named individuals known to be willing to comply with the royal agenda. Still, the campaign was far from an overwhelming success. As noted early, only nineteen City livery companies ended up delivering addresses of thanks for James's first Declaration of Indulgence – out of a total of eighty-four!¹⁶³

In November 1687 James established a committee to regulate the corporations, with the aim of removing obstinate local officials and replacing them with his own nominees.¹⁶⁴ Under the terms of the new charters granted under Charles II during the years of the Tory Reaction, the crown did have the right to order removals; it could, however, only suggest replacements and hope that corporations would comply. A body of local ‘regulators’ was set up under the supervision of the Catholic lawyer Robert Brent to supply the necessary information, carry out the purges, and recruit appropriate replacements.¹⁶⁵ Over the next several months, the crown sent dismissal orders to 103 towns, about half of those incorporated, resulting in the removal of over three-quarters of the members of these corporations. At Bridport, Evesham, Exeter, Nottingham, Saffron Walden and Totnes, the entire corporation was ousted. The crown did not always get it right the first time: 67 of the 103 towns required additional purges, some as many as 5 in total. Indeed, James often found it difficult to obtain the type of corporate membership he desired. Sometimes the removals were never carried out. When they were, those nominated as replacements might choose to decline the offer, or else accept and prove less compliant than anticipated. Some corporations simply failed to install James's nominees. The corporation of York dutifully dismissed its mayor and various other members, but those who remained then protested that they could not elect the King's nominees because these nominees were not freemen and that since York now had no mayor there was no one who could confer the freedom of the city upon them.¹⁶⁶ Hence James found it necessary, like his brother before him, to have recourse to the ultimate threat of quo warranto proceedings to bring the more obstreperous corporations into line. Quo warrantos were threatened against some seventy English and Welsh corporations: most quickly capitulated, though twenty-five showed themselves prepared to suffer a corporate death at the hands of the law. Between March and September 1688 some thirty-five new charters were granted, containing two new provisions: a royal power not only to remove but also to appoint (rather than just nominate) members; and a non obstante clause dispensing all present and future members from taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy or subscribing the declaration against the covenant. On occasion, James forcibly billeted troops on recalcitrant corporations, in order to force them to comply with his wishes.¹⁶⁷ A few corporations, notably Winchester and Oxford, were dissolved without being reincorporated, their governments being placed under special royal commissions. The main beneficiaries of the attack on the corporations were Catholics, dissenters and occasional conformists. At Chichester, in February 1688, the reconstructed city council unanimously agreed a resolution that ‘all the Members’ might ‘keep on their hats’ during meetings, testifying to the fact that many of the new councillors were Quakers.¹⁶⁸ The principal victims were the Church of England men.

Those Protestant nonconformists and erstwhile proponents of Exclusion who now appeared willing to work with James II have usually been styled ‘Whig collaborators’. The term, however, needs to be treated with care. After years of political exclusion and religious persecution, many nonconformists and former Whigs were prepared to avail themselves of James's reforms; how far they were prepared to go in backing James's agenda, however, or the extent to which they were fully committed collaborators, varied considerably from individual to individual. Some cooperated with James only because he had some hold over them. The most infamous example is Sir William Williams, the former Whig speaker of the Commons who became James's Solicitor-General in December 1687: Williams had been fined £10,000 in 1686 for having licensed in 1680 (at the bidding of the Commons) the publication of Thomas Dangerfield's narrative of the Popish Plot, and was facing a separate action brought by the Earl of Peterborough for scandalum magnatum in respect of the same publication. James ordered Peterborough to drop the suit and also remitted the remaining £2,000 of the fine that Williams had yet to pay. Pardoned Rye House plotters or Monmouth rebels often felt that they had no option but to appear to back James, the best-known individuals in this category being John Hampden and John Trenchard, who cooperated with James as little as they dared and were quick to go over to William of Orange in late 1688. Other Whig collaborators were men who were so committed to the cause of religious freedom that the genuineness of their support for the King's tolerationist stance cannot be doubted. Here we can include William Penn and the Whig propagandist Henry Care. Yet there were many who occupied an uncomfortable and ill-defined middle ground, uneasy about James's ultimate goals but well aware that for the time being they would be foolish to reject what was now on offer. They revealed their hesitancy in various ways. Notable London nonconformist Sir John Shorter accepted James's nomination to be Lord Mayor in 1687, but when he came to assume his office he insisted on taking all the oaths and Tests required by law, even to the point of taking the Anglican sacrament. It was a gesture that gave the government ‘some offence’, it was reported, ‘it being a distrust of the King's favour and encourageing that which his Majesties whole Endeavours’ were intended ‘to disannull’.¹⁶⁹

5

Catholic Absolutism in England