The series of storms that deluged the nation in 1678–9 sent Danby to the Tower, exiled the Duke of York to France, faced the queen with a charge of homicide, resigned the Duchess of Cleveland to a life of obscurity, caused the Duchess of Portsmouth to have her bags packed in readiness for sudden flight and almost swept away the dynasty. But storms do not emerge for no reason out of the clear blue air. The charged clouds of the Popish Plot that massed in the later months of 1678 had been building for years. They were made up of the same resentments that had plunged the country into war a generation earlier: indignation at the threat of an imposed religion; fear that parliament was being undermined by the king; conviction that the monarchy was being undermined by parliament; mutual mistrust between the sovereign and the representatives of his people. As in 1641, an organised anti-court ‘party’ had emerged in parliament and if they did not provoke a military insurrection it was not because anger was not deep or widespread enough but because the horror of civil war was firmly imprinted on men’s minds.
For years criticism had found outlets in parliamentary debates, printed satires, scurrilous ballads and the tittle-tattle of tavern and coffee-house but it had changed nothing. For all that the politically aware populace could see, the Stuarts paid no heed to hints or direct complaints; they were set determinedly on the path to the creation of an autocratic Catholic state. It seemed to many that this could only have the most dire consequences. The satire, A Dialogue between Two Horses, probably written by Andrew Marvell, used the conceit of the animals in two equestrian statues of Charles I and Charles II meeting up and discussing the shortcomings of their respective masters. It ended in prophetic vein:
If speech from brute animals in Rome’s first age
Prodigious events did surely presage,
That shall come to pass all mankind may swear
Which two inanimate horses declare.
But I should have told you, before the jades parted,
Both galloped to Whitehall and there horribly farted,
Which monarchy’s downfall portended much more
Than all that the beasts had spoken before.
If the Delphick Sybills oracular speeches,
As learned men say, came out of their breeches,
Why might not our horses, since words are but wind,
Have the spirit of prophecy likewise behind?
Though tyrants make laws which they strictly proclaim
To conceal their own crimes and cover their shame,
Yet the beasts of the field or the stones in the wall
Will publish their faults and prophesy their fall.
When they take from the people the freedom of words,
They teach them the sooner to fall to their swords.88
By 1678 it was not only Marvell who sensed lurid lights and the growling of distant thunder in the political sky. The demand for change was tumultuous, as a popular song clamorously stated:
Would you send Kate to Portugal,
Great James to be a cardinal.
And make Prince Rupert admiral?
This is the time!
Would you turn Danby out of doors,
Banish rebels and French whores,
The worser sort of common shores [sewers]?
This is the time!
Would you make our sovereign disabuse,
And make the parliament of use,
Not to be changed like dirty shoes?
This is the time!
Would you once more bless the nation
By changing Portsmouth’s vocation,
And find one fit for procreation?
This is the time!
Would you turn papists from the queen,
Cloister up fulsome Mazarine [Hortense Mancini],
Once more make Charles great again?
This is the time!89
Charles felt the first raindrops of the impending tempest in July and may have regarded them as little more than an inconvenient shower. They took the form of a long and bitter complaint from Lady Cleveland in Paris about Ralph Montagu. She was incandescent with rage at the antics of the ambassador. When the two of them had met up in the French capital they had started an affair (neither the first nor the last there for either of them) during which Montagu had tried to draw the king’s exmistress into his political intrigues. She was certainly not averse to this – until the summer of 1678. Then, they had a falling-out and, with all the viciousness of which they were capable, each tried to destroy the other. Barbara made a short visit to London, and Montagu, fearful of what she might reveal to the king, sought to undermine Charles’ confidence in her, by sending to him some of her love letters which he had either intercepted or bought. The ploy obviously worked for Charles dismissed his mistress of sixteen years with the words, ‘Madam, all that I ask of you, for your own sake, is live so for the future as to make the least noise you can, and I care not who you love.’ For Charles all passion was spent; he had, at last, shaken himself free and his ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ attitude must have come as quite a shock. But that was as nothing compared to the horrors that confronted her on her return to Paris.
She discovered hitherto unsuspected depths to Montagu’s malice. The town was buzzing with the news of a delicious scandal: as soon as the Duchess of Cleveland’s back was turned, her seventeen-year-old daughter, Anne Fitzroy, Countess of Sussex, had immediately jumped into the bed Mama had just vacated. In truth, Anne was a chip off the old block. She had left her husband, had various other liaisons, including her infatuation with Hortense, and been sent over to Paris for her mother to supervise her moral upbringing! Her fling with Montagu was undoubtedly six of one and half a dozen of the other but it admirably served the ambassador’s purpose of rubbing salt in Barbara’s wounds. However, her plight was very much worse, as she realised as soon as she learned what else the libertine had been up to in her absence. Montagu had gone to King Louis and sought his aid in his private war with the duchess. He gave a highly coloured account of Lady Cleveland’s indiscretions and, claiming to speak for his own master, demanded that Barbara’s latest lover, the chevalier de Châtillon, be banished and that the Lady Anne should be removed from her mother’s care. He suggested that the French king might recommend to his brother monarch that Barbara’s financial lifeline be cut. It is difficult not to feel that Barbara Villiers and Ralph Montagu thoroughly deserved each other.
In a panic of self-preservation and revenge the duchess wrote to Charles, revealing Montagu’s schemes in the most lurid detail she could devise. She made no bones about denouncing, ‘this ill man, who in his heart, I know, hates you and were it for his interest would ruin you, too, if he could’. Montagu, she averred, was a man who
has neither conscience nor honour and has several times told me that in his heart he despised you and your brother; and that he wished with all his heart that the parliament would send you both to travel, for you were a dull, governable fool and the duke a wilful fool … you always chose a greater beast to govern you.
The ambassador’s plan, Lady Cleveland revealed, was to send to Whitehall an astrologer who was in his own pay to warn the king of dire disaster unless he expelled Danby and the Duchess of Portsmouth from his presence. Montagu would then insinuate himself into the position of secretary of state. That, as he had told Barbara, was to be a mere stepping stone:
And when I have it I will be damned if I do not quickly get to be lord treasurer, and then you and your children shall find such a friend as never was. As for the king, I will find a way to furnish him so easily with money for his pocket and his wenches that we will quickly … lead the king by the nose.
Lady Cleveland was swift to distance herself from these schemes:
I told him that I thanked him but that I would not meddle in any such thing, and that, for my part, I had no malice to my Lady Portsmouth or the treasurer and, therefore, I would never be in any plot to destroy them; but that I found the character the world gave him was true – which was that the devil was not more designing than he was. And that I wondered at it; for that sure all these things working in his brains must make him very uneasy and would at last make him mad.90
The letter is very revealing about both Charles and Lady Cleveland. It exposes the unscrupulous way she had become accustomed to harassing the king out of motives of self-interest and how susceptible he was to female influence. Charles’ deep respect for women shaded into unmanly malleability, as his ministers so often complained. In this case Barbara had played the cards of helpless woman and outraged mother in an alien environment. The strategy worked. When Montagu rushed back to Whitehall to put his side of the case to the king he was denied an audience and was informed by underlings that he had been deprived of all his offices.
Ralph Montagu was not the sort of man to accept defeat and retire into private life, his tail between his legs. Indeed, in disgrace he proved himself more dangerous than he had been when sitting in a foreign capital devising plots. He set in motion another plan to bring down Danby. The first step was to get himself elected to parliament where he would have a secure base from which to mount his attack. Opposition to the administration had become clamorous and, as an MP, Montagu could claim immunity from prosecution for anything he said within the chamber. The evidence he possessed to lay before the Commons was dynamite. It consisted of letters sent to Louis XIV by Danby, at the king’s insistence, asking for secret subsidies to aid the French war effort and promising to prorogue parliament if they ever sought to pursue a foreign policy inimical to France. The first use he made of these documents was attempted blackmail. He demanded the office of secretary of state in return for his silence. Danby refused to put himself in his enemy’s power and tried to circumvent any damaging revelation by ordering the seizure of Montagu’s papers. This confrontation failed because the House of Commons, as the ex-ambassador had calculated, stuck by its member and instructed that the evidence should be examined at Westminster, not Whitehall.
Now the guard dog of secrecy which had protected the king’s affairs for so long turned to bite him. Knowing little, the Commons suspected much and were prepared to believe anything. For instance, what was Charles proposing to do with the £300,000 p.a. he had negotiated from Louis?
… it was generally believed that the design was to keep up and model the army now raised, reckoning there would be money enough to pay them till the nation should be brought under a military government. And the opinion of this prevailed so that Lord Danby became the most hated minister that had ever been about the king. All people said now they saw the secret of that high favour he had been so long in and the black designs that he was contriving.91
Danby was impeached on 21 December. The following week Charles prorogued and, subsequently, dissolved a parliament which had sat for eighteen sessions since its election in 1660. The minister’s fate hung in the balance. Only five months before he had buttressed his position by marrying his daughter to ‘Don Carlos’, Earl of Plymouth, Charles’ son by Catherine Pegge. It remained to be seen whether the king would stand by his relative or bow to popular demand for his dismissal and even his death on a charge of high treason.
It was not only Charles who was in a dilemma. Louise’s name was constantly linked with Danby’s in public expressions of denigration. A courtier writing home with the latest news in December opined that the prorogation of parliament was the only way to save Danby,
who, with the Duchess of Portsmouth, made it their whole and daily business to persuade the king to it. She was so zealous that, if I am not misinformed, she was on her knees to the king for several days to prorogue them …92
As the weeks passed, Louise had some hard thinking to do about their business relationship. The new French ambassador, Paul Barrillon, who was hand-in-glove with Montagu, was urging her to drop the minister, as were Ranelagh and his friends who, of course, had their own reasons for wanting Danby brought down. The mistress had to calculate whether to distance herself from the accused or whether, if she abandoned him to his enemies, she might be their next target.
Louise had every reason to be alarmed, for the storm had now broken in full fury. Through the dark days of autumn and winter, court and government had to contend with public panic and anti-Catholic feeling of an intensity not felt since the days of the Armada and with an organised opposition capable of taking full advantage of the prevailing mood. The notorious Popish Plot (see here) aimed to sweep away the highest in the land in a torrent of libels, lies and innuendo but the more politically perceptive realised that the alliance of political dissidents in the Green Ribbon Clubs were potentially more destructive in the long term. This amorphous association was formed by Shaftesbury and Buckingham as a private club in the days after the government’s attempt, in January 1676, to close down the coffee-houses or, at least, inhibit political discussion in them. They brought together members of parliament, merchants, City fathers, Nonconformist activists and sympathisers from the country, all of whom were opposed to the administration for one reason or another. The proliferation of the clubs worried the government, who set informers to spy on their activities. The report of one of these agents in the early days of 1679 gives a fairly clear idea of the Green Ribbon ‘programme’:
The Green Ribbon men meet at Starkie’s and Cotten’s booksellers within Temple Bar and thence go to their clubs where the ordinary discourses are: that the nation is sold to the French, that at Whitehall they look one way and act another, that, whatever is pretended, popery and arbitrary government is intended, that a parliament is not to come again if they at Whitehall can live without it and, if any be suffered to sit, it must be in effect a French parliament or be none, for all is governed by the Duchess of Portsmouth, the Duke of York, the lord treasurer and the French ambassador, who all often meet the king at her lodgings and what is there agreed is next to be put in execution.93
Most of these suspicions, in contrast to the plethora of extravagant rumours scudding round the capital, were well founded. If Charles could have dispensed with parliament, then, like his father, he would have done so. That would only have been possible with French financial support and he would not have hesitated to make his Catholic declaration to buy that support. Of course, he was in no position to do any of these things so he pursued that pragmatic policy his mother had urged on her husband throughout the crisis years of telling every political group what it wanted to hear and making ‘heartfelt’ promises to those whose support he needed. Since the Green Ribbon men were generally so well informed and since they had friends in the Whitehall corridors of power, there is no reason to doubt their conviction that Louise de Keroualle had an important part to play in the king’s inner councils nor that her chambers had become the venue for a kind of resurrected Somerset House junto.
However, what was exciting everyone beyond the huddles of the opposition clubmen were the ‘revelations’ of Titus Oates, Israel Tonge and their confederates. Given the extent of anti-Catholic paranoia in the country, it was, perhaps, almost inevitable that, in the absence of a genuine conspiracy against the Crown, one would be invented. Once invented, it would be sure to be believed. The whole of Europe was fiercely divided on the religious issue. The so-called ‘wars of religion’ may have come to an end but that did not eradicate minority communities of all persuasions nor prevent governments clamping down on those communities. The English parliament made repeated attempts (usually frustrated by the court party) to increase the restrictions on Catholics, most of whom were quietly loyal to king and country. If any objection was raised to such persecution, its defenders only needed to point across the Channel to what was happening in France. Louis XIV regarded his Huguenot subjects as potential rebels and took increasingly harsh measures against the Protestant minority. He pulled down their chapels, offered six livres to every Huguenot who converted and, when these measures failed to produce speedy results, he set in train the dragonnades, the billeting of dragoons on Protestant citizens for the purpose of inflicting upon them unspeakable atrocities. England’s politico-religious agitators had constantly in mind the French bogeyman, whose activities were daily reported by travellers, diplomats and the trickle of Huguenots fleeing from oppression. If the Catholic autocrat thus treated his own people, how would he behave if Britain ever became a mere client state? It is against this wider background that we have to understand the panic caused by the Popish Plot, when,
The world ran mad and each distempered brain
Did strange and different frenzies entertain.
Here politic mischiefs, there ambition swayed;
The credulous rest were fool and coward made.94
Queen Catherine was among those who had to bear the brunt of common suspicion and hatred. Although she was allowed to exercise her religion, a watch was kept on her chapels in St James’s Palace and Somerset House to make sure that no Englishmen resorted thither and, at one time, soldiers raided the warehouse above the queen’s stables in search of popish books. She was frequently met with displays of sullen resentment when she travelled away from the capital. On a visit to Bath in 1676, her presence was pointedly ignored by the authorities through whose territory she passed. The king was furious. He rounded on the sheriffs of Berkshire and Wiltshire for their dereliction of duty and informed them that, as they had failed to pay their respects on the queen’s outward journey, they would make good their omission when her majesty was on her return to London – and he sent the details of her itinerary so that they would have no excuse for failing to comply.
It was on the morning of 13 August 1678, as Charles was setting out for his routine stroll in the park, that he was approached by a certain Christopher Kirkby, with whom he had a slight acquaintance. The man was obviously agitated and when the king asked why, he replied that he feared assassins lay in wait to shoot his majesty. Plots and rumours of plots were scarcely new to Charles and he replied with some nonchalance that if Kirkby had something important to tell him they would discuss it when he returned from his walk. Such was the low-key beginning of the Popish Plot. Like some monstrous, parasitic weed, it would grow with alarming speed, soon outstripping the power of its propagators to halt its devastating progress. The king regained the palace in safety, having encountered nothing untoward and, that evening, he summoned the prophet of doom to explain himself. The story Kirkby told was the one in which he had been schooled by Tonge and Oates, the one a rabid and unscrupulous religious extremist and the other a rootless, inadequate man who had turned to crime as a means of giving his life some meaning. He told a garbled story of a widespread conspiracy backed by French gold to remove Charles, place his brother on the throne and force the nation into the waiting arms of Rome. The king listened courteously, believed not a word of it but referred Kirkby to Danby and went off to Windsor to relax.
When the lord treasurer interviewed Kirkby and Tonge he demanded documentary evidence to support their alarmist allegations. Oates was swift to oblige. He produced forged letters purporting to link the English Jesuit community and members of the queen’s household with a raft of schemes to kill the king. Murderers stood in wait to poison him, stab him or shoot him and French troops were ready to take ship for Ireland as a staging post for the invasion of England. To add weight to his assertions, Oates took an oath before a highly respected London magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (Burnet said that he ‘was esteemed the best justice of peace in England’). Danby, meanwhile, reposed as little trust as his master in the informers and, had it not been for the conspirators’ first piece of good fortune, the matter might have been dropped. Some of Oates’ ‘evidence’ found its way into the Duke of York’s hands and he, smelling a Protestant plot, insisted on a full enquiry by the council. Oates and Tonge had now reached the point of no return. If they were to avoid the dire penalties meted out to perjurers, they had to stick to their story through thick and thin, continuing to embellish it with new ‘facts’ and allegations against more and more prominent people.
It was while the council were mulling over this evidence that the event occurred which lifted the affair out of the realm of in camera discussion and into the public domain. It was an event which seemed to authenticate the plotters’ testimony and which spread throughout the capital panic news of a violent Catholic uprising. On 12 October, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey went missing. What followed was later described graphically and with forensic accuracy by Bishop Burnet, who was an eyewitness. On the night of 17 October, the magistrate’s body
was found in a ditch about a mile out of the town, near St Pancras church. His sword was thrust through him but no blood was on his clothes or about him. His shoes were clean. His money was in his pocket. But nothing was about his neck, and a mark was all around it, an inch broad, which showed he was strangled. His breast was, likewise, all over marked with bruises and his neck was broken … There were many drops of white wax lights on his breeches, which he never used himself and, since only persons of quality or priests use those lights, this made all people conclude in whose hands he must have been … it was [clear that] he was first strangled and then carried to that place, where his sword was thrust through his dead body.95
The perpetrators of this brutal murder were never discovered and it remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of British criminological history.
If the conspirators were not themselves responsible for it, it was another and a most stupendous piece of luck for them, for now, however sceptical king and councillors might remain, people at large were disposed to swallow the Popish Plot hook, line and sinker. Parliament demanded that court and council be utterly purged of Catholics (though they exempted the queen’s household) and that James should be removed from any position of influence. They even tried to make London and its environs a papist-free zone. Known and suspected Catholics were mercilessly harried. A bonfire was made of popish books in New Palace Yard. The Commons cellars were searched for a latter-day Guy Fawkes. The most bizarre rumours flew around the capital and not a few had to do with the king’s women: Sir Edmund had got the Duchess of Portsmouth with child and, therefore, had to be silenced; the magistrate had been murdered in Somerset House where the queen had walked three times exultantly round his dead body and the duchess had spat on his face; the lord chief justice had issued a warrant against Lady Portsmouth for being privy to Sir Edmund’s death; the ‘French whore’ was about to flee the country, either with Danby or the king; etc., etc.96
Fortune continued to smile on the plotters. Among the court personnel at whom they pointed the finger was a man who actually had been involved in clandestine correspondence with foreign Catholic agencies. Edward Coleman was a zealous convert to the faith and had become the secretary to Mary of Modena. ‘A vain, meddling man of shallow intellect … inordinate conceit and strong ambition’,97 his pallid features and sunken eyes giving him an appearance of pious austerity, he had, a few years before, tried to interest French and papal agencies in funding attempts to have the restrictions against British Catholics eased. Now his lodgings were searched, his papers confiscated and he was arrested. At his trial Oates perjured himself up to the hilt, giving lurid details of a scheme involving Coleman and Sir George Wakeman, the queen’s physician, to poison the king. Coleman was duly executed and Wakeman was detained pending trial. Small wonder that the Commons overwhelmingly supported a motion declaring their conviction that ‘there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on by the popish recusants for the assassinating … of the king, and for subverting the government, and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion’.98
La calumnia was now doing its work with appalling efficiency. Flickering fires of accusation and suspicion ran through the City streets, turning neighbours into informers and inoffensive citizens into suspects. In mid-December the latest to be singed was Covent Garden goldsmith, Miles Prance. He was thrown into Newgate’s foullest cell and loaded with chains in the hope that he would confess to complicity in Godfrey’s murder. The terrified man was ready to grasp at any straw to save himself, so that when the conspirators smuggled some papers in to him he readily saw what was required of him. He begged an audience with the Earl of Shaftesbury and revealed what he ‘knew’ about the magistrate’s death. His evidence implicated three members of the Somerset House staff and, though when taken before king and council his nerve failed him and he recanted, he subsequently returned to his original story, with the result that the three wretches were condemned and hanged. The king claimed that he signed the death warrants of these and other condemned men reluctantly and ‘with tears in my eyes’.
These were terrifying days for the queen. She was deprived of some of her most loyal servants and witnessed other members of her household dragged off to prison. She was booed and hissed when she went out in her carriage and was eventually forced to remain at home. At the height of the frenzy the House of Commons demanded that she be packed off back to Portugal, although the Lords vetoed the proposal. And Oates had taken the final plunge by insisting to parliament, ‘I do accuse the queen for conspiring the death of the king.’ An outraged Charles ordered Oates to be confined at Whitehall but later had to respond to a parliamentary protest and set him at liberty. Catherine bore her trials with considerable fortitude. Her main source of comfort was the unfailing support of her husband, as she confessed in her letters to her brother, the Prince Regent, Dom Pedro. Charles and Catherine might be a semi-attached couple who saw less of each other than in former years and Charles might derive more pleasure from the company of other women but he had never failed to render the respect and honour which were the queen’s due. Now, in a time of crisis, these served as a platform on which he built a new edifice of genuine affection. Certainly there was a degree of self-preservation in his defence of the queen: if those closest to the Crown were allowed to topple, what might become of the Crown itself? Certainly family pride was involved, as it was when Charles insisted on the right of his brother to succeed him, although he had little confidence in James’ ability. But the basis of his support for the beleaguered queen was that chivalrous consideration and loyalty he had always shown, uniquely, to women and which the Earl of Newcastle had instilled into him as a child. Charles indicated his attitude in his own letter to Catherine’s brother:
We doubt not but that your Highness hath already heard of the unhappy reflection that hath lately been raised against our dear consort, the queen and do believe your Highness hath taken a sensible part with us in that indignation wherewith we have resented the same. We brought the matter (as soon as it was known) into our council board, and the reception which it there had we are sure will not sound unpleasing to your Highness, because it gave satisfaction to us and did let the queen clearly see that all was done for her present vindication which the time would permit. But this misfortune arising while the [parliament] of our kingdom were assembled, who by their constitution may take cognisance of whatever happens of an extraordinary nature, [Pedro was much more absolute in his dominions, even though he ruled as regent for his feeble-minded brother] they drew enquiry before them. [They] … found motives to reject the complaint and, instead of favouring the accusation, the time was only spent in magnifying her virtues …99
Dom Pedro was not mollified. He reflected angrily that ‘the Diocletian persecution was nothing to this of the parliament of England’.100 He sent over a highly placed dignitary of his court, the marquis de Arouches, to convey Catherine back to her homeland, where, he had decided, she should spend her remaining days in the Sacramento convent, close by his palace.
The Stuart monarchy was now facing its greatest crisis since 1641. The king and those closest to him were under siege from all sides and would need nerves of steel to survive. Elections to the new parliament, which convened in March, produced a House of Commons in which opponents of the regime were even more numerous than before. They immediately resumed the attack on Danby. Charles tried his utmost to save the minister. In return for Danby’s voluntary resignation, the king granted him a full pardon, and was present in person to see the Great Seal attached to it. At the same time he raised the ex-treasurer to the marquisate. If this was a defiant gesture of loyalty, it was also an act of self-preservation. Charles knew, as his father had known, that every concession weakened the monarchy and it was during this crisis that Charles II came closest to the stubbornness that had characterised Charles I. His attitude was captured by Dryden in his play Troilus and Cressida, which had its first performance in April and related, in scarcely veiled terms, to the current political situation. Urging his brother to disembarrass himself of a woman for his own safety, Hector says,
If parting from a mistress can procure
A nation’s happiness, show me that prince
Who dares to trust his future fame so far
To stand the shock of annals, blotted thus:
He sold his country for a woman’s love.
To which Troilus staunchly replies,
And what are they that I should give up her
To make them happy? Let me tell you, Brother,
The public is the lees of vulgar slaves:
Slaves, with the minds of slaves.
Though he would never have used such language, Charles held the Commons in similar contempt. If they demanded the sacrifice of a minister, a mistress or a wife, he would – he must – stand firm. He assured Danby that he would not allow the ‘malicious prosecution of the parliament’ to proceed. But proceed it did. The House of Lords tried to rescue the fallen minister by demanding his banishment but the lower house would have none of it. Danby was despatched to the Tower and, while legal arguments were raging, Charles once again prorogued parliament and subsequently dissolved it. In sharp contrast to its predecessor, this ‘first exclusion parliament’ lasted little more than four months. Charles had fallen back on his father’s tactic of trying to dispense with an assembly that was getting too big for its boots.
To save friends and close advisers he used every conceivable trick, short of giving the demonstrative representatives what they wanted. In March, Shaftesbury introduced an Exclusion Bill into the upper chamber, which sought to remove James from the line of succession. The earl’s supporters, who now began to be identified by their enemies as ‘Whigs’, after the extremist, Presbyterian rebels of an earlier day, failed to carry the motion but they now had not only a cause – Protestant succession – but a choice of figureheads. Some favoured William, Prince of Orange, who had recently married James’ elder daughter, Mary. Others were for recognising the claim of Charles’ eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. Around the beginning of the year, there had, indeed, been a determined pamphlet campaign aimed at proving that the king had, in fact, been married to Lucy Walter, Monmouth’s mother. Charles not only denied this, he denied it with all the force at his disposal. He made a solemn declaration to his intimate advisers, repeated it in full council, personally wrote and signed a document declaring ‘in the presence of Almighty God, that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catherine now living’. Finally he published the disavowal for all to read in the London Gazette. At the same time Charles tried to placate the opposition by giving Shaftesbury and some of his friends positions in a newly formed government. To ease the tension he also sent the Duke and Duchess of York abroad.
For both Charles and Catherine this was their most abysmal crisis. It was also their finest hour. Driven together, they supported and drew strength from each other. When Charles refused the easy way out of nominating Monmouth as his legitimate heir it was in the full realisation that to let parliament settle the Crown upon a head of their choosing would be to betray everything that the monarchy stood for. But he also had Catherine in mind and his vehement denial of a contract with Lucy was also a vehement affirmation of the solidity of his marriage. Catherine responded warmly. She, too, shunned the chance to run away from a distressing situation. Instead of obeying her brother’s command to return home she was adamant that she would stay at her husband’s side. This decision was made more difficult for her by the hectoring of the marquis de Arouches, who accused her, in front of the court, of disloyalty to her family and nation, and by angry letters from Dom Pedro. The queen was struck to the heart and complained bitterly to her brother of his ambassador’s behaviour:
… he speaks to me in terms so different from those my replies merit that he gives me cause for pain … and because I fear he may dare to write to you in the same doubtful manner as that in which he dared to speak in my presence, I am obliged to give this explanation, that the truth may be clearly known.
I have no need of praise from the marquis but it is very degrading that you doubt me. The king will speak on my behalf [as will] as many as know me, who know that there is no-one on earth whom I value more highly than the Prince of Portugal, my brother. By the chastisement of God, I have been forced to give evidence of the truth of what I did not think had been doubted. But it is your minister who has done these services to you and me and forces me to demonstrations such as no slanders whatever laid upon me by mine enemies compelled me to do till now … It seems you are practising to take away my life with pure grief …101
King and queen both extended their protection to others threatened by the general hysteria. When parliament obliged Catherine to shear her entourage of all but a handful of papists, one of the ladies she elected to keep was Lady Portsmouth. It was a magnanimous gesture motivated by a love for her husband which was stronger than her resentment of the exhibitionist rivalry with which Louise lorded it at Whitehall. In July, Sir George Wakeman, Catherine’s physician, came up for trial. Every other judicial proceeding against men fingered by Oates and Co. had ended in conviction and the anti-court party confidently expected another show trial which would keep the Popish Plot bandwagon rolling. Charles had other ideas. The claws of bigotry and mass hysteria were reaching out towards the queen and had to be slapped down hard. He took a leaf from the conspirators’ book. They had been manipulating the courts and undermining justice for their own ends; he would do the same. His first manoeuvre was to have Wakeman’s accusers brought before the council. Throughout two long sessions Oates and his accomplice, William Bedloe, were quizzed as to the evidence they had implicating the queen. It amounted to very little but Charles was not content to score a partial victory; he was set on discrediting the plotters and weakening their political opposition. He made sure that Wakeman was provided with full details of the case against him and that the chief prosecution witnesses were brought into court and available for cross-examination. It is almost certain, also, that the king leaned on Lord Chief Justice Scroggs, the presiding judge, for that unscrupulous and belligerent anti-papist who had been a tower of strength to the Oates camp in previous trials now made a complete U-turn. (His interruptions and summations were notoriously peppered with such remarks as ‘This is a religion that quite unhinges all piety, all morality … They eat their God, they kill their king and saint the murderer.’) He warned the jury not to be swayed by plots and rumours of plots and not to deprive a man of his life without clear and unassailable evidence. The twelve good men and true took the hint and acquitted Wakeman.
It was the first setback the plotters had encountered and the government hoped that the tide had turned, but matters were destined to get worse before they got better. Now it was the Duke of Monmouth’s cook who laid fresh information before Shaftesbury concerning members of Catherine’s chaplaincy team, supposedly implicated in one of the many foiled attempts on the king’s life. The earl demanded the right to interrogate the queen. This Charles angrily refused and then demonstrated his support for his wife by frequent visits to Somerset House, often staying with her for most of the night. But the royal couple were desperately worried and contingency plans were made for Catherine’s speedy departure for Portugal if this became necessary. Then, as if things were not bad enough, Charles, who prided himself on his strong constitution, fell suddenly ill. The vultures immediately gathered. James and Monmouth rushed back to court and their supporters were ready to contest the succession. The king made a quick recovery but the scare had underlined for all concerned the urgency of deciding the succession. Charles sent the two contenders away again and also took advantage of a surge of popularity to dismiss Shaftesbury. A few weeks later he repented of this step and offered the Whig leader another post but Shaftesbury responded that he would only accept if the king withdrew support from both his brother and his wife, conditions which were, of course, quite unacceptable.
It really did seem to many that ‘41 is come again’. Crown and parliament were at loggerheads and the country was dividing along politico-religious lines. In February 1679 there was a riot in the King’s Theatre provoked by Monmouth’s supporters. Charles angrily closed the playhouse for several weeks but that chastening did not prevent a further tumult in the summer when ‘many swords were drawn’. It wanted only a charismatic leader, a Pym or a Cromwell, for open rebellion to break out. Over the next year Charles put off the recall of parliament no fewer than seven times, while desperately appealing to Louis for funds that would enable him to ‘subsist’. Opposition leaders were furious and resorted to other measures – pamphlets and petitions – to make their demands known. The Duke of Monmouth, daily increasing in popularity, chafed at his exile and was encouraged in his ambitions by supporters at home. At the end of November he could stand the inactivity no longer. Without permission he returned to London and was secretly lodged in Shaftesbury’s house. The news leaked out and the citizens lit bonfires and rang their bells in jubilant welcome. Charles was furious at having the delicate political balance he was trying to sustain so wantonly upset by his own son. He refused to see Monmouth, stripped him of all his offices and ordered him out of the country.
Among those who tried to pour oil on troubled waters was Nell Gwynn. She was Monmouth’s friend and he was careful to cultivate her as a conduit to the king. This does not mean that she supported his claim to the throne. In fact she ridiculed him for it in her own irreverent way and called him ‘Prince Perkin’ (after one of the pretenders to Henry VII’s throne). Nell, who had no great ambitions for her own sons, may well have considered Monmouth’s claim presumptuous. After all, he had no more right to the Crown than any of Charles’ other male bastards. But Nell’s greatest motivation is likely to have been her loyalty to and affection for the king. She never wavered in her devotion and never engaged in any political intrigues. Now she did her best to reconcile father and son but even her wiles were on this occasion powerless to overcome Charles’ anxiety-driven indignation. Monmouth was at a turning point. He could obey the king and win his way back into favour or make a concerted bid for popular support. He often came to Nell’s house in Pall Mall and her advice was succinct: ‘pack up and be gone’, she said. But patient waiting was not in the young duke’s nature and ‘he gave himself fatally up to the Lord Shaftesbury’s conduct, who put him on all the methods imaginable to make himself popular. He went round many parts of England, pretending it was for hunting and horse matches, many thousands coming together in most places to see him, so that this looked like the mustering up the force of the party.’102 In fact, apparent success was an illusion. The rallying of enthusiasts and the merely curious to the duke’s presence alarmed not only those who were, by conviction, loyal to the Crown, but also the rank and file of English men and women who caught the scent of civil war in the air.
While Catherine and Nell stuck close to the king, Louise cast around for political allies. It is difficult to follow her shifting allegiances in the months of the Popish Plot and its aftermath. She had certainly sent large sums of money to France to provide a cushion against any sudden flight that might be forced upon her but escape was a last resort. Remaining in her own luxurious lair at the centre of national life could not but involve her with the leading politicians who were seeking to manipulate events for personal and party advantage. The man who emerged as the leader of the ruling clique after the departure of Danby and Shaftesbury was Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, a thoroughgoing politique adept at following the track of personal advantage through the thickets of political complexity. He drew around him a party of men – the ‘Tories’ – who identified with a strong monarchy, adherence to the Church of England and opposition to toleration. Since Sunderland needed close contact with Charles he naturally paid court to Lady Portsmouth. However, if she was to be a bridge between king and minister she had to be firmly fixed at both ends and, given the evasiveness and secrecy of the two men, this was seldom easy. Sunderland was actually in favour of striking some kind of a deal with William of Orange in order to combat the threat of Monmouth, and Louise seems to have supported this policy. At the same time she realised that Charles rejected tinkering with the accepted rules of hereditary succession and she knew that he was striving mightily for French support and freedom from the shackles of a Protestant parliament. Yet she was careful not to cut herself off entirely from the opposition, and for this she had a very personal reason.
The over-subtle Montagu, who was leader of a parliamentary group only tangentially connected with Shaftesbury, pointed out that exclusion could work to Louise’s advantage. His scheme involved persuading Charles to pass over his brother’s claim to the throne in return for an Act of Parliament which would grant him the right to nominate his own successor. He calculated that William, Monmouth and their supporters would all be bound to support this compromise. However, once the succession lay entirely in Charles’ gift, those who had the greatest influence over him would, in effect, be the real kingmakers. And who most likely to be the dominant figure among his counsellors but the Duchess of Portsmouth? That being so, she would be able to persuade Charles to nominate her own son. Montagu had one more ace to lay before her: to secure the support of France young Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond, could be offered as a husband to Louis XIV’s natural daughter, the duchesse de Bourbon. Did Louise fall for this Byzantine strategy? Did she not realise that Charles the schemer could recognise a fellow practitioner when he saw one? Well, Montagu was, as we have already seen, extremely plausible and his plan awakened all Louise’s hubristic ambitions.
Yet still she kept her options open. While contemplating a plan that would deprive James of his inheritance, she maintained close contact with the duke and was widely believed to be acting in his interests. She was, for example, among those who wrote urgently to him when Charles fell ill. The heir presumptive, while exiled from the centre of power, desperately needed her advocacy and remained in close contact with her. Their main intermediary was Louis Duras, Earl of Feversham (modern Faversham). Duras, the younger son of a great French family and nephew of the magnificent General Turenne, had a military and diplomatic career behind him and was a favourite of the Duke of York, who had complete trust in him. He came by his title as an indirect result of one of the most celebrated tragedies of the era. In 1655, Freeman Sondes, the wastrel younger son of Sir George Sondes, a fervent Kentish royalist impoverished by the war, despatched his sleeping elder brother with a cleaver and was subsequently hanged for the murder. The devastated Sir George was left childless and his grief was compounded soon after by the death of his wife. The following year he married a woman of the Villiers family, who eventually presented him with two daughters. Duras married the elder girl, and when his father-in-law was raised to the peerage, he secured the remainder to Sondes’ estate and titles. The crisis of the late 1670s brought Feversham into the bosom of the Stuart family as a trusted adviser and confidant. In December 1679, he became Catherine’s master of the horse and, a few months later, her lord chamberlain. He was precisely the kind of well-connected Frenchman to whom Louise naturally gravitated and the two worked closely together. So closely that, in the following spring, a Taunton goldsmith was indicted for saying that King Charles had no council but the Duchess of Portsmouth, the French ambassador, Lord Duras and Lord Lauderdale.103
The duchess had always advertised (and perhaps exaggerated) her influence with the king and, having seen off the challenge of Hortense Mancini, she was more inclined than ever to emphasise her importance. Politicians were obliged to canvas her support but, if they were wise, they did so circumspectly, for she was now more widely hated than ever and Louise’s friendship could be a double-edged sword. In a contemporary satire the duchess’s ministerial allies are represented as saying,
She is the strongest pillar of our hope,
The surest friend of our brave Plot and pope.
She is all power; she is all command.
By her assistance we’ll betray this land.104
Popular invective against Louise, encouraged by the lapsing of the Licensing Act in June 1679, reached new lavatorial depths:
Portsmouth, that pocky bitch,
A damned papistical drab,
An ugly, deformed witch,
Eaten up with the mange and scab.
This French hag’s pocky bum
So powerful is of late,
Although it’s blind and dumb,
It rules both Church and State.105
Just how determined her enemies were to remove her from the king’s side became clear at the end of 1679, when the opposition launched a well-orchestrated attack aimed at bringing the duchess to trial. A tract entitled Articles of High Treason and Other High Crimes and Misdemeanours against the Duchess of Portsmouth was published in the New Year. It accused Louise of a whole raft of diabolical acts, including sending vast sums of money out of the country, protecting Lord Ranalegh from prosecution, causing the repeated prorogation of parliament, maintaining the ‘accursed amity’ between France and England, sneaking Catholic priests into the royal chambers, spreading a rumour that she and Charles were secretly married and that her son was the rightful heir to the throne, involvement in the Popish Plot, and attempting to poison the king with the aid of a French confectioner especially brought over for the purpose.106 The opposition intended to proceed against the duchess by parliamentary impeachment and Charles’ determination to thwart them was a major reason for his repeated prorogation of the assembly.
The determined attacks on the maîtresse en titre severely shook her and her allies. Sunderland now distanced himself from Louise and she abandoned the Duke of York. By the time parliament reconvened in October 1680, both mistress and minister had been wonderfully converted to the cause of exclusion. Louise had to proceed carefully. Through an intermediary she made contact with William, Baron Howard of Escrick, a radical parliamentarian but one who had already demonstrated chameleon qualities as a politician. The two held clandestine meetings at Whitehall to which, it was later claimed, the king was party. Exactly what was said at these tête-à-têtes will never be known but the flow of information must have been two-way; Louise probing the activities of Shaftesbury’s party and Howard trying to determine whether Lady Portsmouth could bring Charles to accept the necessity for exclusion.
Louise obviously, through Howard, impressed the Whig leadership for when, in January, a motion was raised in parliament for her removal from court it gained no support and was quashed by the Whigs, who now believed that she might be useful to them. She seems to have convinced herself and her new allies that Charles had come round to the inevitability of keeping James off the throne. The fate of the second Exclusion Bill must, therefore, have been as much of a shock to her as all other parties and factions involved. Charles, his back to the wall, reacted with a resolution which took everyone by surprise. The bill easily passed all its stages in the lower chamber but when it was brought into the House of Lords the king attended all sessions of the debate and made his opposition quite clear. The peers rejected the Bill by thirty-three votes. A stunned Commons responded by offering Charles £600,000 in supply in return for exclusion but he firmly rejected the bribe and once more prorogued parliament. A week later came another dissolution.
Louise was now exposed as having no greater access to the king’s innermost thoughts than anyone else and this led to her public humiliation. Now her political alliances crumbled. Sunderland was dismissed and other advisers who had favoured exclusion were removed from the council. Charles summoned parliament to meet on 21 March 1681, but not at Westminster. He deliberately removed MPs and peers from the influences of the capital and chose Oxford, that city always loyal to the Stuarts, for the next session. When he arrived to open it he was in uncompromising mood and he gave bystanders a very visual demonstration of this. The three travelling companions with him in his coach were Catherine, Louise and Nell.