The New World: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume II (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading Series)

“A Tory is a monster with an English face, a French heart, and an Irish conscience. A creature of a large forehead, prodigious mouth, supple hams, and no brains. They are a sort of wild boars, that would root out the Constitution, . . . that with dark lanthorn policies would at once blow up the two bulwarks of our freedom, Parliaments and Juries; making the first only a Parliament of Paris, and the latter but mere tools to echo back the pleasure of the judge.”¹ The Whig, on the other hand, “talks of nothing but new light and prophecy, spiritual incomes, indwellings, emanations, manifestations, sealings, . . . to which also the zealous twang of his nose adds no small efficacy. . . . This little horn takes a mouth to himself, and his language is Overturn, Overturn. His prayer is a rhapsody of holy hickops, sanctified barkings, illuminated goggles, sighs, sobs, yexes, gasps, and groans. He prays for the King, but with more distinctions and mental reservations than an honest man would in taking the Covenant.”²

One can see from these expressions of scorn and hatred how narrowly England escaped another cruel purging of the sword. Yet the names Whig and Tory not only stuck, but became cherished and vaunted by those upon whom they were fastened. They gradually entered into the whole life of the nation, and represented in successive forms its main temperamental types. They were adorned by memorable achievements for the welfare of England, and both had their share in the expansion and greatness which were to come. Party loyalties and names came to be transmitted by families across the generations, though the issues changed with the times and the party groupings varied. Orators and famous writers, sure of their appeal, pointed to them in terms of pride.

The harassed King, rather than face his fourth Parliament, adopted an expedient which recalls the futile Magnum Consilium to which his father had been drawn forty years before. Sir William Temple, envoy at The Hague, a leading advocate of an anti-French policy and architect of the triple alliance which had checked Louis XIV at Aix-la-Chapelle, proposed a plan for a Privy Council, reduced in numbers but clothed with power. Thirty magnates of both parties, half officeholders, half independent, would replace the old secret Cabal or Cabinet which had connived at the Treaty of Dover. For good or ill the royal policy should be open; there was to be an end, it was thought, of secret diplomacy. Charles was now in full breach with Louis XIV, who scattered his bribes widely among the Opposition. He accepted the plan. A glorified Privy Council assembled. Shaftesbury, the leader of the Opposition, was appointed its president by the King. These well-meant endeavours came to nought. The stresses were too great, and inside the Council of thirty there soon developed an inner ring which conducted all the business. Shaftesbury was in no wise placated by his readmission to official life. He did not abandon the movement and party of which he was head. On the contrary, he used his position to advance their interests. When Parliament met in October 1680 he again championed the Exclusion Bill, and at this moment he reached his zenith. He seemed to combine in himself the power of a Minister of the Crown and the popularity of a leader of incipient revolt. The Exclusion Bill was carried through the Commons, and the struggle was fought out in the Lords.

That it ended bloodlessly was largely due to the statesman who has rendered the word “Trimmer” illustrious. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, was the opponent alike of Popery and of France. He was one of those rare beings in whom cool moderation and width of judgment are combined with resolute action. He could defend a middle course with a constancy usually granted only to extremists. He could change from side to side, with or against the current, without losing his force or the esteem in which he was held. He never shrank from the blasts of public frenzy, and rose above all taunts and aspersions of time-serving. In the immortal pen-pictures which Dryden has drawn of the personalities of these turbulent days none is more pleasing than that of Jotham, who

Halifax, who had been so hot against Danby, broke the Exclusion Bill in the House of Lords. His task was rendered easier by the difficulty of advancing an alternative successor to the Crown. Of those who were against James some were for his eldest daughter, Mary, wife of the renowned Prince of Orange, in whose veins the royal blood of England also flowed. Shaftesbury had played with this idea, but in the end decided for the bastard Monmouth. He procured his admission to the Privy Council. He wove him into the texture of his party. The Whigs propagated the fiction that he was legitimate after all. Anyhow, the King dearly loved his handsome, dashing son. Might he not, as pressures and perils gathered about him, take the safe and easy course of declaring him legitimate? But this complaisant solution, which Charles would never tolerate, did not appeal to an assembly every man of which owned lands, wealth, and power through the strictest interpretations of hereditary right. The Anglican Church refused to resist Popery by crowning bastardy. By sixty-three votes to thirty the Peers rejected the Exclusion Bill.

The fury against the Popish Plot was gradually slaked in the blood of its victims. In November 1680 one of the last of them, Lord Stafford, declared his innocence on the scaffold, and the crowd cried, “We believe you, my lord.” The fabric of lies in which Oates and others had decked themselves was wearing thin. The judges began to look pointedly at contradictions and irrelevances in the evidence by which the lives of Catholics were sworn away. The mood of panic had been too keen to last. The fact that the King was obviously severed from Louis XIV mitigated political passion. Charles saw in this new temper the chance of a more favourable Parliament. Halifax, fresh from rendering him the highest service, opposed the dissolution. He thought there was still something to be made of the Parliament of 1680. But the King, after a full debate in his Privy Council, overrode the majority. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have heard enough,” and for the third time in three years there was an electoral trial of strength. But this was challenging the electors to go directly back on what they had just voted. Again there was no decisive change in the character of the majority returned.

Presently it was learned that Parliament was to meet in Oxford, where the King could not be bullied by the City of London and Shaftesbury’s gangs of apprentices called “White Boys.” To Oxford then both sides repaired. Charles moved his Guards to the town, and occupied several places on the roads from London with troops. The Whig lords arrived with bodies of armed retainers, who eyed the Household Cavalry and gallants of the Court with the respectful hostility of gentlemen upon a duelling ground. The Members came down in parties of forty or fifty, the London M.P.s being escorted by armed citizens. A trial of strength impended, and none could tell that it would not take a bloody form. The large majority of the Commons was still resolved upon the Exclusion Bill.

It would seem that the King kept two courses of action open, both of which he had prepared. He had caused Lawrence Hyde, Clarendon’s son, the Duke of York’s brother-in-law, a competent financier, to examine precisely the state of the normal revenue granted to the Crown for life. Could the King by strict economies “live of his own”? In this calculation his foremost thought was the upkeep of the Navy, which he consistently set even in front of his mistresses and his own comfort. Hyde reported that it was impossible to discharge the royal services upon the original grant of customs and excise and such further taxes as Parliament had conceded. With strict economy however the deficit would not be large. Hyde was next employed in negotiating with Louis XIV, and eventually a hundred thousand pounds a year was obtained upon the understanding that England would not act contrary to French ambitions on the Continent. With this aid it was thought the King could manage independently of the ferocious Parliament. England had now reached a point in its history as low as when King John, in not dissimilar stresses, had made it over as a fief to the Pope. Modern opinion, which judges Charles’s actions from the constitutional standpoint, is revolted by the spectacle of a prince selling the foreign policy of his country for a hundred thousand pounds a year. But if present-day standards are to be applied the religious intolerance of Parliament and the party violence of Shaftesbury must also be condemned.

Moreover, the King did not intend to adopt this ignominious policy which he had in his pocket, or almost in his pocket, unless he found no hope in Parliament. He made a show of going to extreme lengths to meet the national fear of a Popish King. The sacred principle of hereditary succession must not be destroyed, but short of this every security should be given. James, when he succeeded, should be King only in name. The kingdom would be governed by a Protector and the Privy Council. The accident of the conversion of the heir presumptive to Rome should not strip him of his royalty, but should deprive him of all power. The administration should rest in Protestant hands. If a son was born to James he would be educated as a Protestant and ascend the throne on coming of age. In default of a son, James’s children, the two staunch Protestant princesses, Mary and after her Anne, would reign. The Protector meanwhile was to be no other than William of Orange.

There is no doubt that the King might have agreed to such a settlement, and could then have defied France and made an alliance with the Dutch and the Protestant princes of Germany. Not one can lightly censure this scheme, and the fact that it was framed reveals the grinding conflicts in Charles’s mind. But Shaftesbury thought otherwise. He and all his party were set upon Monmouth for the Crown. Parliament had no sooner met than its hostile temper was apparent. The King in his speech deplored the factious, unreasonable behaviour of its predecessor. The House of Commons re-elected the old Speaker, who hinted in his humble address that they saw no need for change in their demeanour. Shaftesbury, still a member of the Privy Council, in a sense part of the Government, held a hard conversation with the King in the presence of many awestruck notables. A paper was handed to Charles demanding that Monmouth should be declared successor. Charles replied that this was contrary to law and also to justice. “If you are restrained,” said Shaftesbury, “only by law and justice, rely on us and leave us to act. We will make laws which will give legality to measures so necessary to the quiet of the nation.” “Let there be no delusion,” rejoined the King. “I will not yield, nor will I be bullied. Men usually become more timid as they become older; it is the opposite with me, and for what may remain of my life I am determined that nothing shall tarnish my reputation. I have law and reason and all right-thinking men on my side. I have the Church”—here he pointed to the bishops—“and nothing will ever separate us.”

The sitting of the Commons two days later, on March 26, 1681, was decisive. A private Member of importance unfolded to the House the kind of plan for a Protestant Protectorate during James’s reign which the King had in mind. Charles would perhaps have been wise to let this discussion proceed. But Oxford was a camp in which two armed factions jostled one another. At any moment there might be an outbreak. Just as James would sacrifice all for his religious faith, so Charles would dare all for the hereditary principle. There was no risk he would not run to prevent his beloved son, Monmouth, from ousting a brother who was the main source of all his troubles.

The Commons passed a resolution for excluding the Duke of York. On the Monday following two sedan chairs made their way to Parliament. In the first was the King, the crown hidden beneath his feet; in the second, which was closed, were the sceptre and the robes of State. Thus Charles wended his way to the House of Lords, installed in the Geometry School of the university. The Commons were debating a question of jurisdiction arising out of a Crown prosecution for libel, and a Member was declaiming about the bearing of Magna Carta upon the point, when Black Rod knocked at the door and summoned them to the Peers. Most Members thought that this portended some compliance by the King with their wishes. They were surprised to see him robed, upon his throne, and astounded when the Chancellor declared in his name that Parliament was again dissolved.

No one could tell what the consequences would be. Forty years before the Scottish Assembly had refused to disperse upon the warrant of the Crown. A hundred years later the National Assembly of France was to resort to the tennis court at Versailles to affirm its continued existence. But the dose of the Civil War still worked in the Englishmen of 1681. Their respect for law paralysed their action. The King withdrew under a heavy escort of his Guards to Windsor. Shaftesbury made a bid to convert the elements of the vanished Parliament into a revolutionary Convention. But no one would listen. Charles had hazarded rightly. On one day there was a Parliament regarding itself as the responsible custodian of national destiny, ready to embark upon dire contention; the next a jumble of Members scrambling for conveyances to carry them home.

From this time Shaftesbury’s star waned and the sagacious Halifax entered the ascendant. The reaction against the execution of the Catholic lords and others was now apparent, and the submission of Parliament to a third dissolution gave it substance. Within two months the King felt strong enough to indict Shaftesbury for fomenting rebellion. This strange man was now physically almost at the last gasp. His health, though not his spirit, was broken. His appearance—he could hardly walk—dismayed his followers. The Middlesex Grand Jury, faithful to his cause, wrote “Ignoramus” across the bill presented against him. This meant that they found the evidence insufficient. He was liberated according to law. But meanwhile one of his followers had been hanged at Oxford on charges similar to those which Shaftesbury had escaped in London. He could no longer continue the struggle. He counselled insurrection; and it seemed that a royal murder would be one of its preliminaries. Shaftesbury at this point fled to Holland, hoping perhaps for Dutch support, and died at The Hague in a few weeks. He cannot be ranked with the chief architects of the Parliamentary system. As a Puritan revolutionary he understood every move in the party game, but he deliberately stained his hands with innocent blood. He sought above all the triumph of his party and his tenets. His life’s work left no inheritance for England. He was as formidable as Pym, but his fame sinks to a different level.

The absorbing question now was whether there would be civil war. All the Cromwellian forces were astir; indeed, there was a terror in men’s hearts that if James came to the throne they would have to choose between turning Papist and being burnt at the stake. Their fears increased when James returned from exile in May 1682. It was only a generation since Cornet Joyce had carried off the King from Holmby House. An ex-officer of the Roundheads, “Hannibal” Rumbold, who had been on duty around the scaffold at Whitehall on the memorable 30^th of January, dwelt in the Rye House by the Newmarket Road, where it ran through a cutting. Fifty zealous Ironsides could easily overpower the small travelling escort of the King and the Duke of York on their return from their pastime of horse racing. Above this dark design, and unwitting of it, was a general conspiracy for armed action. Many, but by no means all, of the forces which were to hurl James from the throne a few years later were morally prepared to fight. Various Whig noblemen and magnates had taken counsel together. The lucky accident of a fire in Newmarket, by which much of the town was destroyed, led Charles and James to return some days before the expected date. They passed the Rye House in safety, and a few weeks later the secret of the plot was betrayed. It compromised the much wider circles in which armed resistance had been considered.

When the news spread through the land it caught the Royalist reaction upon its strong upturn. It transformed everything. Hitherto the Whigs had exploited the Popish Plot and made common folk believe that the King was about to be butchered by the Roman Catholics. Here was the antidote. Here was a Whig or Puritan plot from the other side to kill the King. All the veneration which Englishmen had for the monarchy, and the high personal popularity of Charles, with his graceful manners and dangerously attractive vices, were reinforced by the dread that his death would make his Papist brother King. From this moment Charles’s triumph was complete. Halifax urged the summoning of another Parliament. But the King had had enough of such convulsions. With Louis’ subsidy he could just manage to pay his way. When thirty Catholic victims had been slaughtered on false perjured evidence and Charles had had to sign the death warrants it is not surprising that he let himself swim with the vengeance of the incoming tide.

Two famous men were engulfed. Neither William Lord Russell nor Algernon Sidney had sought the King’s life; but Russell had been privy to preparations for revolt, and Sidney had been found with an unpublished paper, scholarly in character, justifying resistance to the royal authority. The Tory Cavalier party, relieved of its fears and now roused in its turn, clamoured for vengeance. Charles classed Russell, and to a lesser extent Sidney, with Sir Harry Vane as enemies of the monarchy. After public trial both went to the scaffold. Russell refused to attempt the purchase of his life by bowing to the principle of nonresistance. Sidney affirmed with his last breath the fundamental doctrines of what had now become the Whig Party. Intense discussion was held by Church and State with both these indomitable men. Nothing was yielded by them. Ranke, in a moving passage, says: “In this lies the peculiar mark of this century, that in the clash of political and religious opinions, which struggled for supremacy, unalterable convictions are formed which lend the character a firm inward bearing, which again raises it above the strife of party struggle. As the die falls, so men either obtain power and gain scope for their ideas, or they must offer their neck to the avenging axe.”

These executions were of lasting significance. Martyrs for religion there had been in plenty. Protestant, Catholic, Puritan, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, Quaker, had marched the grisly road unflinching. Great Ministers of State and public men had fallen in the ruin of their policies; the Regicides had faced the last extremity with pride. But here were the first martyrs for the sake of Party. The whole Bedford family, in its widespread roots and branches, vindicated the honour of Russell; and the Whigs, already content with their name, revered from one generation to another these champions of their doctrine and interest. Long did they extol the cause for which “Hampden died upon the field and Sidney on the scaffold.” The Whig Party has passed from life into history. When we consider how the principles of free government, then struggling for acceptance and authority in a world of cross-purposes and misunderstanding, are precious to those now living we too must salute the men who testified so early and so plainly.

The power of Charles at home remained henceforth unchallenged. He was able to make a counter-attack. The Whig strongholds were in the boroughs and cities. These depended on their charters for the control of local government and the benches of magistrates. Influence at Parliamentary elections was also at stake. By pressure and manipulation Tory sheriffs were elected in London, and henceforth through that agency City juries could be trusted to deal severely with Whig delinquents. Nothing like Shaftesbury’s acquittal could occur again. Success in London was followed up in the Provinces. The Whig corporations were asked by writs of Quo Warranto to prove their title to their long-used liberties. These titles were found in many cases, to the satisfaction of the royal judges, to be defective. Under these pressures large numbers of hitherto hostile corporations threw themselves on the mercy of the Crown and begged for new charters in accordance with the royal pleasure. The country gentlemen, ever jealous of the privileges of the boroughs, lent their support to the Government. Thus the Whigs, overborne in the countryside, now saw their power crippled in the towns as well. It is remarkable that they should have survived as a political force and that the course of events should so soon have restored them to predominance.

Against his own wishes the triumphant King followed meekly the foreign policy which his French paymaster prescribed. He lived with increasing frugality; his mistresses became concerned for their future, and scrambled for pensions solidly secured upon the revenues of the Post Office. Only the Fleet was nursed. Louis continued his aggressions and waged war upon freedom and the Protestant faith. His armies overran the Spanish Netherlands; he laid his hands on Strasbourg; he made inroads upon the German principalities. He ruled splendid and supreme in Europe. England, which under Elizabeth and Cromwell had played a great European part, for a while shrank, apart from domestic politics, to a quiescent and contented community, busy with commerce and colonies, absorbed in its own affairs and thankful they were easier.

Across the seas widespread thrusts were taking place, often on the initiative of the men on the spot rather than by planned direction from London. English commerce was expanding in India and on the West Coast of Africa. The Hudson Bay Company, launched in 1669, had set up its first trading posts and was building up its influence in the northern territories of Canada. On the coasts of Newfoundland English fishermen had revivified the earliest colony of the Crown. On the American mainland the British occupation of the entire eastern seaboard was almost complete. The capture of New York and the settlement of New Jersey had joined in contiguity the two existing groups of colonies that lay to the north and south. Inland the state of Pennsylvania was beginning to take shape as an asylum for the persecuted of all countries under the guidance of its Quaker proprietor, William Penn. To the south the two Carolinas had been founded and named in honour of the King. At the end of Charles’s reign the American colonies contained about a quarter of a million settlers, not counting the increasing number of Negro slaves, transhipped from Africa. The local assemblies of the colonists were sturdily asserting traditional English rights against the interventions of the King’s Ministers from London. Perhaps not many Englishmen at the time, absorbed in the pleasures and feuds of Restoration London, foresaw the broad prospects that stretched out before these comparatively small and distant American communities. One who caught a glimpse was Sir Winston Churchill. Towards the close of his life he published a book called Divi Britannici which has been unfavourably referred to by Macauley, in praise of the greatness and antiquity of the British monarchy. Churchill wrote with pride of the new horizons of seventeenth-century Britain, “extending to those far-distant regions, now become a part of us and growing apace to be the bigger part, in the sunburnt America.” But all this lay in the future.

Talk of excluding James from the throne died away. He had now become the vehement supporter of French aims in Europe. Unchastened by the past, he dreamed of reconverting England to Rome under the sword of France. Nevertheless, his own popularity revived. His conduct afloat was not forgotten. sang the Tory rhymesters. He resumed his functions. In all but name he became again Lord High Admiral. He dilated to Charles, who had no illusions, upon the proved efficacy of a strong policy. He braced himself and hardened his heart for the mission which lay before him.

The King was only fifty-six, and in appearance lively and robust, but his exorbitant pleasures had undermined his constitution. To represent him as a mere voluptuary is to underrate both his character and his intellect. His whole life had been an unceasing struggle. The tragedy he had witnessed and endured in his youth, the adventures and privations of his manhood, the twenty-five years of baffling politics through which he maintained himself upon the throne, the hateful subjugations forced on him by the Popish Plot, now in his last few years gave place to a serene experience. All the fires of England burned low, but there was a genial glow from the embers at which the weary King warmed his hands.

Halifax, now more than ever trusted, still urged him to the adventure of a new Parliament, and Charles might have consented, when suddenly in February 1685 an apoplectic stroke laid him low. The doctors of the day inflicted their tormenting remedies upon him in vain. With that air of superiority to death for which all mortals should be grateful he apologised for being “so unconscionable a time in dying.” James was at hand to save his soul. Old Father Huddleston, the priest who had helped him in the days of the Boscobel oak, was brought up the backstairs to rally him to Rome and give the last sacrament. Apart from hereditary monarchy, there was not much in which Charles believed in this world or another. He wanted to be King, as was his right, and have a pleasant life. He was cynical rather than cruel, and indifferent rather than tolerant. His care for the Royal Navy is his chief claim upon the gratitude of his countrymen.