Despite having suffered short bouts of illness in 1679, in 1680 and again in 1682, as he approached his mid-fifties Charles II was generally thought to be in excellent health; the most he had was a touch of gout. The illness which struck on the morning of Monday 2 February 1685 therefore took everyone by surprise. The King rose early, having not slept well the night before (he was normally a heavy sleeper), and at about seven o'clock, ‘coming from his private Devotions, out of his Closet’, he suddenly collapsed in what contemporaries described as ‘a Fit of an Apoplexy’. He was immediately bled, but it was clear that he was desperately ill. Over the next few days various doctors applied all the latest treatments in a frantic attempt to save his life: he was purged, bled, blistered and cauterized; red-hot irons were applied to his shaved skull; and he was administered in total some fifty-eight drugs. For a while he seemed to revive, but by Thursday he had again taken a turn for the worse. Later that day Father John Huddleston, the Catholic priest who had assisted Charles in his escape from Worcester back in 1651, was smuggled into the royal bedchamber to receive the King into the Roman Catholic Church and to administer the last rites. Charles was to die at about a quarter to twelve the following morning, Friday 6 February. He was not yet fifty-five. Despite the contemporary diagnosis of apoplexy, Charles had not had a stroke. Instead, he was suffering from chronic glandular kidney disease (a form of Bright's disease) with uraemic convulsions. Unconvincing allegations were later to be made that his brother had poisoned him. It is more conceivable that Charles had poisoned himself. The King was a keen amateur chemist, and had spent much time in recent years experimenting with mercury; his kidney failure and uraemia thus could well have been induced by mercury poisoning, although this remains pure speculation. What seems clear, however, is that, for all the torture Charles's doctors inflicted upon their patient, they did not kill him; the King would have died of the disease in any case.1
The story of Charles II's death has often been told. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this scene, however, but something that is rarely commented upon, is where it took place: the King's bedchamber in the royal palace of Whitehall. Charles II's father had had his head severed from his body on a specially erected scaffold outside his own Banqueting House. Charles II's brother and successor was forced to flee his realms after less than four years on the throne and was to end his days ignominiously in exile – albeit in his bed, but not as king. Charles II had faced similar problems to his father: a rebellion in Scotland, a destabilized Ireland, and an alliance of opposition politicians and discontented elements throughout England protesting against an alleged threat of popery and arbitrary government. By 1679–80 it had seemed to many contemporaries that 41 was come again. And, of course, Charles II faced the self-same problems that his brother was to find unmanageable and which were to cost him the thrones of his three kingdoms. For the Merry Monarch to have died in his bed, still as reigning king of England, Scotland and Ireland, was no mean achievement.
It is clear that by 1685 the crown had escaped the crisis that had confronted it in 1679–81. By the time of James II's accession the position of the monarchy had been considerably strengthened and the Whig challenge effectively defeated. When James called his first parliament that spring, a mere 57 Whigs were returned to a House of Commons of some 513 members. This was not merely the result of the royal interference in electoral franchises that had taken place in the final years of Charles II's reign, since those years had also seen a swing in public opinion towards the crown; in the 1685 general election the Tories also did well at the polls in the more open constituencies with large electorates, which were least susceptible to court management. In fact it is undoubtedly the case that James was popular at the time of his accession. There was widespread rejoicing throughout the three kingdoms when he was proclaimed king in February, and over the next several months some 439 congratulatory addresses came in from various places and groups across England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the crown's foreign dominions, pledging allegiance to the new king, acknowledging his just and rightful succession, and rejoicing at the failure of Exclusion.2 Not that James's accession was all plain sailing. There was a rebellion in 1685 – or rather two (since they were not, in the end, the coordinated efforts they were intended to be): one led by the Earl of Argyll in Scotland, the other by the Duke of Monmouth in England. Yet neither proved to be much of a threat; between them, in fact, they were able to muster fewer supporters than had joined the Bothwell Bridge rebellion of 1679, and both were fairly easily put down. During the Exclusion Crisis, many people had genuinely feared the possibility of renewed civil war and had doubted whether a Catholic successor could succeed peacefully – after all, there was talk of Protestants associating themselves to ensure that he did not. James's accession in 1685 could have triggered a real bloodbath. It did not. The crisis had passed. The threat had not been entirely eradicated, but it had been effectively contained.
It is the story of how Charles II's regime first fell into crisis and then got itself out of it that this book has sought to tell. Why, when the restoration of monarchy had appeared so welcome to all groups across the British Isles in 1660, did the Restoration polity appear on the verge of collapse within less than two decades? Undoubtedly, things would have gone easier for Charles II if he had been able to father a legitimate son (assuming that son was brought up a Protestant) or had had a Protestant heir. But to blame the crisis on some contingent factor – an accident of the succession – it has been shown here, is misguided. There were fundamental structural problems with the Restoration polity in each of the three kingdoms – problems that made Charles II's inheritance extremely difficult to manage. Although most people welcomed the return of monarchy in 1660, they expected different things from the restored monarch – and not just different things, one must add, but mutually incompatible things. This was true within each kingdom. In England, there were those who wanted the monarchy to be more accountable to parliament; there were others who thought the monarchy had already become too accountable to parliament. There were separatists who wanted liberty of conscience, Presbyterians who wanted to be comprehended within a reformed Church of England (and who initially would have agreed with the Anglicans that the last thing one could do was to allow the separatists liberty of conscience), and hardline Anglicans who were as much against comprehending Presbyterians as they were against tolerating the sects. In Scotland, there was the bitterly divisive conflict between Presbyterians and episcopalians. And in both kingdoms religious conflict was to be further inflamed by bouts of intense religious persecution. In Ireland, there were tensions between Catholics, Church of Ireland Protestants and Protestant non-conformists, partly over religion (although here persecution was less of an issue), but also over the questions of economic and political rights, access to legal justice, and – the most controversial issue of all – the land settlement. Charles could not please all groups. If he gave the Catholics in Ireland back their land, he would upset the Protestants from whom he took that land. If he did not enforce the laws designed to prop up episcopacy in Scotland and keep the Scottish Presbyterians in their place, he would upset the Scottish episcopalians. If he did not enforce the penal laws designed to meet the challenge of dissent in England, he would alienate the high-Anglican interest, the group most supportive of his attempts to consolidate and strengthen royal power after years of civil war and republican experiment in government. Yet if he did not give the Catholics in Ireland justice, or if he allowed the full weight of the law to be used against Scottish and English nonconformists, he ran the risk of driving significant numbers of his subjects in each of his kingdoms into rebellion.
However, the problems were not simply within each kingdom; they were also between the kingdoms. Charles II could not devise a strategy that he thought might work in one of his realms without having to think about the knock-on effects it could have on one of his others. For example, he could not easily work to appease discontented Catholic elements in Ireland without running the risk of being accused in England of being soft on popery. He could not easily deal with the very real and subversive threat posed by the radical Presbyterians in Scotland – a country that by dint of the nature of its terrain was not particularly easy to police at the best of times (particularly by an absentee monarch) – without having recourse to measures that could make him vulnerable in England to charges of promoting arbitrary government in his northern kingdom. The crisis that had emerged by the end of the 1670s, in other words, was genuinely a three-kingdoms crisis. It was a crisis that stemmed from the problems of managing a troubled multiple-kingdom inheritance where the political and religious tensions that existed within each kingdom cut deep into society, and where any initiatives taken to try to deal with the problems that these tensions generated were likely to cause further difficulties. Thus when the crisis came in 1679–81 – triggered, it is true, by fear of an imminent Catholic succession in the aftermath of the supposed Popish Plot it was about much more than what might happen, in the future, should the Catholic Duke of York inherit his brother's crowns. It was about the failings of the Restoration polity; it was about Charles II's style of government in all three of his kingdoms; it was about the threat of popery and arbitrary government in the present.
In the event,’ 41 did not come again. Charles II never lost control of the situation in the way that his father had done. A number of factors were important here. Although Charles II faced a rebellion in Scotland in 1679, this time the Scottish rebels were not to be victorious as they had been on the eve of the Civil War. The Scots were thus not able to hold the English to ransom as they had in 1640–41, when they had occupied the north of England and demanded that the English parliament pay them off before they went home. This had made it impossible for Charles I to dissolve his English parliament when faced with demands for reform in England; with his hands thus tied, the English parliament was even able to induce Charles to assent to an act preventing its dissolution without its own consent.3 Charles II never became trapped in that way. He retained his freedom to determine when, and for how long, parliament should sit, and this gave him considerably more room for manoeuvre than had been available to his father. He was able to use his prerogative to prorogue and dissolve parliament to forestall the Whig challenge and, having forestalled it, to devise mechanisms whereby he could then go on and defeat it. Part of the reason why '41 did not come again must therefore relate to why the Scots were unable to launch a successful rebellion in 1679. The simple explanation is that the Scots were much less united in 1679 than they had been in 1637–41 (itself a legacy of the Civil War and Interregnum) and therefore were unable to mount such a significant challenge to the Stuart regime as they had done earlier. In 1637–41 it was the Scottish nation that rose up against Charles I; in 1679 it was just one faction within that nation. Although there was considerable disaffection in Scotland by the late 1670s, there were too many Scots who were willing to remain loyal to Charles II. And, perhaps most importantly, Charles never lost the affection of the Scottish ruling elite, as his father had done. Moreover, with regard to Ireland, although the situation did not always look that healthy and there were repeated reports of a potential Irish rebellion during Charles II's reign, there was in fact to be no repeat of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. The British crisis of 1637–41, although it threatened to, did not duplicate itself in 1679–81.
Yet this is not the sole reason. James II did not face a rebellion in Ireland either – nor really in Scotland, if we discount Argyll's paltry affair. He also held on to his prerogative power of proroguing and dissolving parliaments, and was not trapped into meeting with an assembly he would rather have got rid of in the way that Charles I had been. Indeed, because of the improved financial circumstances of the crown in the 1680s, James was to be more independent of parliament than his brother. And yet James II was unable to hold on to his kingdoms. Besides, Charles II did not merely escape a crisis; he rebuilt the power and authority of the monarchy in the face of a crisis.
Charles's success here was due in large part to his ability to win over public opinion. The court and its Tory allies sought to persuade the King's subjects that the greater threat to English liberties and the Protestant religion was posed by the Whigs and their nonconformist allies rather than the Catholic successor, and that if they wanted to prevent popery and arbitrary government they needed to stick by the existing government in Church and state as by law established and rally in support of the crown and the heir to the throne. What impresses is the very scope of Tory propaganda at this time: the Tories sought to reach not just the ruling classes and the educated elite, but also the middling and lower sorts. The opinions of ordinary people mattered; it was important to have these people on one's side, and to be seen to have them on one's side, especially in England. The reasons for this relate to the way that governance worked in early modern England. To make its rule effective, the crown depended on the co-operation and unpaid assistance of a wide range of people at the local level – not just the Lord Lieutenants, and their deputies, and the gentry JPs who ran the counties, and the merchants and businessmen who ran the corporations, but also the more humble types who played a crucial role in governance and law enforcement in their capacities as trial jurors, parish constables, nightwatchmen, militiamen and even informers. By the late 1670s it was the fact that Charles II had lost the support of many of these types of people, across the social spectrum, that explains why he was finding it difficult to govern the country in the way he would have wanted. It was his ability to win enough of these people back in the early 1680s which helps explain the success of his final years. Appealing to public opinion was not by itself enough, admittedly; the government also embarked on a policy of repression (to remove the Whigs and their nonconformist supporters from positions of power and to make sure they bore the full brunt of the law for any transgressions that they might have committed), in order to make sure that the Whig threat was neutralized. It took both policy and police to defeat the Whig challenge, and we must never lose sight of the importance of the policing part of this formula. Nevertheless, the Tory Reaction would not have been as successful as it was without being predicated upon a swing in public opinion towards the crown and its Tory allies which had already begun to take place.
Charles II also recognized that his multiple-kingdom inheritance, although problem-ridden, need not necessarily be a problem for the crown. Indeed, he realized that he could make it work to his advantage. Hence Charles quite self-consciously developed a British solution to defeat the challenge posed by the Whigs in England. Thus after dissolving the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 he called a parliament in Scotland, where he knew he would meet with greater success in getting his legislative agenda accepted, and was rewarded with a Succession Act which affirmed that parliament could not exclude the heir to the throne in Scotland. This in turn made Exclusion in England non-viable, unless people wanted to risk embroiling the three kingdoms once more in civil war. Moreover, Scottish MPs in 1681 were well aware that they had been called to make a political point to their English counterparts; they, too, understood the nature of the British game they were being invited to play. Indeed, we have seen time and time again how important the three-kingdoms factor was in the defeat of the English Whig movement. Tory propagandists raised public anxieties about the alleged threat of the English Whigs and their nonconformist allies by pointing to what the radical Presbyterians were still up to north of the border. Tory polemicists were further able to point to the Duke of York's success during his two stints as head of the government in Scotland between 1679 and 1682, and also to his keen support for the episcopalian establishment north of the border, as showing that the English had nothing to fear from York's succession. Yet York's popularity in Scotland, as evidenced by the enthusiastic receptions he received when he visited that kingdom or went on a royal progress there – together with the lack of support for Exclusion in Ireland – showed the English why they should have everything to fear from those who pressed to exclude York from his rightful inheritance. It was two kingdoms against one; if the English were to act unilaterally, war with the other two would inevitably follow.
This book, then, has testified to the importance of public opinion in later-Stuart England, Scotland and Ireland. Yet we face the question of how genuine were the manifestations of public opinion we have encountered. The court and its Tory allies made a deliberate effort not only to appeal to public opinion but also to encourage people to demonstrate their loyalism, by subscribing to a loyalist address, say, or by celebrating at a bonfire; indeed, courtiers and local Tory leaders actively promoted such addresses and bonfires. The same could also be said of the Whigs, since they too orchestrated petitioning campaigns and public demonstrations in support of their cause, although for some reason it has always been easier for historians to believe that ‘the people’ (whoever they were) were against the government of Charles II than in favour of it. Moreover, once we have evidence of mass opposition to the government by 1679–81, it seems difficult to understand how so many people could have changed their minds so quickly in such a short space of time. Could the Tory position really have been popular?
What hampers our understanding here is the fact that the historiography of popular political agitation in the early modern period has for so long been fixated on the question of authenticity.4 Instead, we should recognize that the real issue at stake is that of mobilization. When we ask whether a particular movement was authentically popular we typically elide two different issues: whether the people who participated in it genuinely agreed with the principles that the movement stood for, and whether the movement was actually organized by the people. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that those below the elite, whether they opposed or supported the government, could orchestrate their own petitions, addresses or demonstrations; yet often they did not. Frequently, as we have seen, local political leaders led the way, and encouraged people to join in through appropriate incentives (such as free alcohol or firework displays, to encourage the masses to come out and cheer at a bonfire, for example). Indeed, we can find examples of the privy council or even the King himself ordering local political leaders to see that bonfires were put on or that there were appropriate public displays of loyalist affection. This does not necessarily mean, however, that those who joined in such loyalist displays were not giving expression to their authentic opinions. To suggest that the chance of a free drink would make people who really supported the other side come out and cheer for their enemies strains credibility – especially when the choices they faced were so stark (do we exclude the Duke of York or not? do we persecute the dissenters or not?), and especially when there was plenty of opportunity to join in counter-demonstrations (which again might be promoted by local political leaders with liberal supplies of free food and alcohol). This is why, in order to understand the political leanings of the mass of the population in early modern England, Scotland and Ireland, the place to start is not with the appeal to ‘the people’ from ‘above’ (by politicians, propagandists or whoever they might be) but with the lived experiences of the people themselves. We must first explore the extent to which people had or had not become alienated as a result of the policies pursued by those in power – recognizing all along, of course, that we are dealing with a multiplicity of interest groups and that different groups of people were therefore likely to respond to government policies in different ways. This in turn helps us to recognize that the apparent fickleness of the people – the apparent dramatic swing from opposition to loyalism from 1679 to 1683 – is precisely that: no more than an appearance. There was undoubtedly some swing in public opinion away from the Whigs and in favour of the Tories in those years – and probably an even greater swing following the revelations of the Rye House Plot in the summer of 1683, as many of those who would have regarded themselves as decently minded, middle-of-the road, respectable Protestants would have become sickened by the extremes to which some, at least, of the Whigs had sunk. Nevertheless, when we take a closer look at what was going on at the ground level, it is clear that for the most part those who were critical of the government's agenda in 1679–81 and those who actively supported it in 1681–3 were different people.
The crucial issue at stake here, to reiterate, is mobilization. As should be apparent to readers of this book, it is not clear that the spectrum of opinions across England, Scotland and Ireland in, say, 1681–5 was any different from what it had been in 1674–81, or even in the early years of the Restoration. The same various interest groups that we see in the different kingdoms at the beginning of the period were still there at the end; if anything, the sources of tension and the causes of division had become intensified by the end of Charles II's reign, as a result of the policies of the Tory Reaction. What changed over time was the degree to which the various interest groups had been mobilized to give public articulation to where they stood on the crucial political issues of the day. In the late 1670s the Whigs were very successful in mobilizing the masses against the government of Charles II and the Catholic succession by playing on people's fears of popery and arbitrary government in both the future and the present, but in doing so they were able to exploit genuine disaffection that already existed at the grass-roots level in many places across the three kingdoms. The fact that so many people were willing to take to the streets or sign petitions to demonstrate their opposition to the government made many others, who perhaps did not instinctively see themselves as opponents of the later Stuart regime, sit up and wonder whether perhaps something quite serious might be wrong and feel that something needed to be done about it. It also left those who did not support the Whigs feeling isolated and out of tune with public sentiment; so they remained quiet, and did not say or do anything to reveal their own political proclivities. The task that the court and its Tory allies set themselves in the early 1680s was to mobilize this last group – those natural Tories who had been intimidated into silence by the success of the Whig appeal to opinion out-of-doors – in the hope that, by encouraging loyalist activism among them, these might in turn be able to rally those who were not natural Whigs but who had temporarily become convinced that something must be wrong because of all the noise that the Whigs were generating. Now the Tories were making a lot of noise themselves – they were rhyming noise with noise, as L'Estrange put it in his own inimitable way.5 It was by no means clear to the casual observer that public opinion was behind the Whigs. Whether local magistrates or humble parish constables, those in positions of authority who had not liked the Whigs or the nonconformists in the first place now began to gain the confidence to act against enemies of the crown who violated the law. Those who might have wondered whether the Whigs had a point increasingly came to doubt that they did. Those who feared trouble should York succeed increasingly came to see that, given the number of outspoken loyalists, there was likely to be even more trouble if the Duke were not allowed to succeed. And, as the Whigs became more and more desperate as they lost the political momentum, some of the more extreme of their number began to engage in the sort of radical conspiratorial politics that seemed only to confirm what the Tories had been saying of the Whigs all along.
This is why the mobilization of public opinion was so important. What mattered was whether one could be seen to have public opinion – and the opinions of the right sort of people – on one's side. This was not totally divorced from what the political opinions of the people actually were, of course; the more real Tories there were out there, the more it helped the government's cause. Yet there might not necessarily be a close correlation between the representation of public opinion and what public opinion actually was, as the case of Ireland illustrates. In Ireland, as we have seen, there was a movement of loyalist addresses in 1682–3, similar to that in England. There was no such counterpart in Scotland at this time. Certainly there is evidence of popular loyalism in Scotland, but the sorts of public loyalist display we see north of the border were so blatantly encouraged, even orchestrated, by the government that some may have reason to doubt their authenticity. Ireland, as the reader will surely have noticed, seems much more like England than does Scotland. But that is in large part because Ireland was a dependent colony (albeit theoretically a kingdom in its own right), which was governed by a narrow ruling elite belonging to the Established Church who saw themselves both as the English interest and as Anglicans, and who governed through an administrative system of counties, quarter sessions and assizes based on the English model. The loyal addresses that came out of Ireland represent the opinions almost exclusively of Protestants of the Established Church in Ireland, who formed less than 10 per cent of the entire population, and then only the social and political elite within this group. Clearly the addresses do not say much about opinion in the kingdom as a whole. No doubt the loyal addresses that came out of England and Wales say more about public opinion there, but they still represent the opinions of only the anti-Whig Anglican interest. Nevertheless, having these pledges of support from so many different groups and places across England and Wales proved a major propaganda coup for the government – one that greatly facilitated its task in taking on the Whigs and their nonconformist allies.
There was an irony here, of course. At the same time as the court and its Tory allies were trying to mobilize public opinion in support of the crown and the hereditary succession, they were embarked upon policies designed to strengthen the position of the crown and to make the monarchy less vulnerable to public criticism or to any institutional checks on its authority. For all his readiness to appeal to the public sphere, Charles II was hardly a monarch who was committed to the flourishing of that sphere. The government's preferred strategy was to prevent ordinary people debating politics – in other words, to shut down the public sphere. When it found that that did not work, and that the Whigs had managed to excite the public against the government and the succession, the government recognized the need to beat the Whigs at their own game and appeal to public opinion. But its basic intent was to use all the media available to get its own message across to the people while at the same time doing its best to silence dissenting voices – by using the law of seditious libel against Whig polemicists who overstepped the mark, by using the authority of England's oldest university to censure certain offensive doctrines, by using the laws against nonconformity to strike at dissenting preachers, by making sure that the Anglican pulpits were filled with men loyal to the government's cause, and by issuing orders to stop bonfire commemorations on Whig anniversaries on the grounds of preserving public order. Significantly, once the tide of public opinion had seemingly begun to turn in favour of the Tories by the end of 1682, the government tried to reimpose a clampdown on the press by urging the Stationers' Company of London to enforce its own by-laws regulating the publishing trade. As a result, not only were the Whig newspapers stopped, but most of the Tory ones too – with the notable exceptions of L'Estrange's Observator and the government organ the London Gazette.6 What we see, in other words, is a government which realized that it had been unable to contain the public sphere, which recognized that it temporarily needed to engage with it, and which, after having successfully done so, then sought to contain it once again.
Indeed, some would see the final years of Charles II's reign as witnessing a drift towards royal absolutism. On the surface there seem to be compelling reasons to conclude that they did. Defenders of the crown certainly embraced absolutist rhetoric, openly professing that the king was absolute, that he shared his sovereignty with no one, and that he was irresistible. After 1681 Charles did not call another parliament in any of his three kingdoms; in England, this left him in violation of the 1664 Triennial Act, which required parliaments to be called every three years. It is true that Charles could not tax without parliamentary consent, but with subsidies from Louis XIV and improvements in the customs and excise he did not need a parliamentary subsidy in England, while the Scottish parliament had already been sufficiently generous in the taxes it had voted the crown that the monarchy was well covered for several years to come. Nor did parliament seem likely to cause much of a threat in any of the kingdoms in the near future. The Scottish parliament was fairly easy to control because it was a single-chamber assembly where legislative initiatives were managed by the Lords of the Articles, the composition of which was controlled by the crown. The Irish parliament was subject to Poynings’ Law, which meant that all legislation had to be approved by the privy council in England. Only the English parliament could really pose a threat to the king's autonomy, but the measures taken in England during the years of the Tory Reaction ensured that when a parliament eventually was called, at the start of James II's reign, it proved to be an overwhelmingly loyalist body. Furthermore, during his final years Charles made sure that the crown had effective control over various other bodies or institutions that might serve as independent checks on the crown's authority: the borough corporations, the judicial and magisterial benches, local juries, and so forth. Indeed, by 1684 Charles was able to maintain formidable standing armies in both England and Ireland (8,865 and 7,500 men respectively) without recourse to parliamentary taxation.7 Was this not, in effect, royal absolutism in practice, as well as in theory? Charles may well have had considerable numbers of the traditional ruling elite and a significant cross-section of the (Protestant) population on his side in all three of his kingdoms (and the acquiescence and perhaps even active support of many Catholics in Ireland), but the establishment of royal absolutism in France in the seventeenth century (so at least some would argue) was also achieved by coopting the traditional ruling elites in the localities, and even by a careful marketing campaign designed to persuade people to see the merits of this system of government.8
If we are not careful, the debate over whether or not Charles emerged as an absolute monarch runs the risk of becoming somewhat sterile, caught up in endless discussions over the definition of terms and what would truly meet the criteria of an absolutist regime. The crux of the historical enterprise is understanding the reality of a given situation in the past, not haggling over whether a particular label or ‘ism’ is appropriate or not. It is therefore the realities of the political power that the monarchy enjoyed in the final years of Charles II's reign that we need to comprehend, and which Part II of this book has sought to describe in detail. As we have seen, there were ways in which the monarchy of Charles II was both absolute and limited, as contemporary champions of royal authority themselves were prepared to acknowledge. Moreover, the nature of Charles’ powers was different in his three kingdoms. For instance, as mentioned above, he was beholden to his respective parliaments in England, Scotland and Ireland in different ways. He seems to have had greater arbitrary power in Scotland in the 1680s than in England, to judge by the respective ways he was able to deal with the challenge posed by Protestant dissent in these two realms. Yet, if the king was in theory and in practice above the law in all three of his kingdoms, he was nevertheless supposed to rule according to law. Indeed, Charles II was quick to insist throughout his final years that he was determined to rule by law – and by and large he did do so (the main exception being his violation of the Triennial Act, although there was undoubtedly also some bending of the law in other respects). This in itself should come as no surprise. Some of the worst tyrants in history have sought to manipulate or exploit the law in order to justify their actions. Moreover, in monarchical regimes the law tends to be set up in such a way as to give greatest advantage to the monarchy. The law in England, Scotland and Ireland recognized that the monarch possessed considerable discretionary powers, while numerous laws had been passed since the Restoration that were designed to protect the crown from the challenge of political and religious dissidents. It was in Charles's best interest to do things ‘by colour of law’, but to make sure that he put men in charge who could give him the most favourable reading of the law possible.9 There is nevertheless an interesting contrast here between the three kingdoms. In England and Ireland during the final years of his reign Charles used existing law to defeat his political and religious enemies; in Scotland, by comparison, the regime self-consciously innovated, passing new laws in 1681 designed to give the crown even greater power in its efforts to crush all forms of dissent. Since contemporaries themselves recognized that there could be different degrees of royal absolutism, we might say that Charles II was more absolute in his northern kingdom in his final years than he was in either Ireland or England, but that that greater degree of absolutism had been conferred upon Charles by parliamentary statute.
Yet, if Charles had established royal absolutism, we are entitled to ask ‘to what end?’ In France, absolutism had been constructed not only to secure internal peace, but also to enable France's divinely ordained monarchy to pursue an aggressive and ambitious foreign policy in pursuit of ‘la gloire’. Charles's aim had been purely defensive: to defeat his political enemies and avoid possible civil strife. He was unable to pursue any positive policy to promote the greatness of his newly created absolutist state. In fact, given the way that Charles had sought to strengthen the position of the monarchy in his final years, it is difficult to see how he left the crown in a position to pursue an ambitious, independent policy of its own. We can see this most clearly with regard to England. Here the King and his Tory allies had tapped into anti-nonconformist and anti-Catholic prejudices and sentiments in support of the existing constitution in Church and state as by law established that were deeply held by large sections of the population. Indeed, in many areas of policy – such as in the drive against corporations or against dissent – we can see the crown following the lead of Tory and Anglican zealots in the localities. For all his theoretical absolutism, Charles had effectively made the crown the prisoner of a party; he had made the crown strong because he was at last doing what the Tories and Anglicans wanted him to do, and they were therefore willing to give the crown their wholehearted support. The real test of the extent to which royal absolutism had effectively been established in England would surely come if and when the crown found it necessary or desirable to break free from its Tory-Anglican allies and pursue a policy in Church and state not to their liking. That day would come under James II. James was convinced he was an absolute monarch and therefore would face no difficulties as he sought to undermine the Tory-Anglican ascendancy in an effort to help his co-religionists. History was to prove him wrong.
The situation in both Scotland and Ireland was in this regard quite similar to that in England. In these two kingdoms Charles had likewise been able to gain the enthusiastic support of Protestants of the Established Church because he had shown himself willing to back their interest. Royal strength in Scotland and Ireland, as in England, depended upon picking the right allies and then making sure that they got sufficient of what they wanted that they would remain loyal servants of the royal interest and use the power they enjoyed or were given in order to eradicate any forms of dissent that might prove a threat to the position of the crown. James II was also to run into problems in his other two kingdoms when he failed to nurture these loyalist interests in the way that they expected.
Charles's genius was to recognize the realities of where royal power lay. After a highly inauspicious first couple of decades, by the last years of his reign he had at last learned how to play the game effectively. He and his advisers had come to appreciate the value of propaganda, the importance of pronouncements about the theoretical powers of the monarchy, and the value of winning over the hearts and minds of the people. They had come to realize that in order to destroy one's political opponents one needed first to strip them of public support, to make their cause appear illegitimate in the eyes of the nation, before using all the repressive forces available to the state to eradicate the threat they posed. They had further come to appreciate that possessing a multiple-kingdom inheritance could be a boon and not just a burden: that, with skill, the different kingdoms could be played off against each other in order to obtain an outcome favourable to the interests of the crown. And they had come to recognize that by doing all this in a skilful enough way they could actually set about undermining those very institutions that had imposed any check on the authority of the crown, thus greatly strengthening the crown's power in the process. Charles II did all this because he wanted to avoid civil war, not because he harboured any pretensions to cut a figure in Europe as a budding absolutist monarch; his strategy was defensive, rather than aggressive. But then one might say that the construction of French absolutism likewise started as a defensive measure to avoid civil war.
The political analyst can admire Charles's achievement, and might even congratulate him on the skilful way in which he managed to extricate himself from a major crisis of the sort that could well have brought the monarchy down – a crisis of the sort that did indeed bring down the monarchy under Charles I and under James II. The historian, however, cannot end on such a positive note. There was an enormous human cost to Charles's success. We recalled in Chapter 1 how the popular image of Restoration England is that of a country reacting against the austerities of Puritan rule, presided over by a merry monarch eager to have a good time while he could and determined never to go on his travels again if he could avoid it. Granted, Charles's sexual exploits would have shocked the Victorians. Yet they are much less offensive to present-day sensibilities, and at least people were having fun again: after all, people got Christmas, the theatre and their maypoles back. Put like that, the image seems rather cosy (if perhaps overly hedonistic), and Charles eminently benign. This is to give a seriously distorted impression. Charles was, in the words of one biographer, ‘the most savage persecutor’ ever to wear the English crown.10 It is true that fewer people were executed for their religious beliefs in Restoration England than under Mary I, who burned nearly 300 Protestants at the stake between 1555 and her death in 1558. Nevertheless, Charles's reign saw tens of thousands of English non-conformists suffer heavy fines and imprisonment for their religious beliefs; many of them lost their jobs and had their lives ruined, while several hundreds – maybe many more – were to die in Restoration jails. Whole communities were torn apart as loved ones were lost, employers were thrown in prison or fined out of business and forced to lay off workers, and neighbours were encouraged to inform against neighbours. People were stripped of their basic rights and privileges, as judicial and magisterial benches were purged and juries were packed to ensure that justice was administered in the way the King saw fit, and as corporations were forced to surrender their charters and thereby lose their much-cherished political autonomy. And this was just in England. Things were much worse in Scotland, where not only did thousands suffer brutal persecution for failure to conform to an episcopalian Church that had been restored by royal fiat, but many were brutally tortured and others shot in the fields or drowned on beaches for their political and religious principles. Ireland may not have faced the degree of religious persecution that either Scotland or England experienced. Nevertheless, three-quarters of the population the Irish Catholics - were denied basic political, economic, religious and legal rights (whatever benefits they enjoyed were by connivance or dispensation rather than by law), while many from the Catholic landowning classes failed even to get a hearing to stake their claim to regain the land that had been wrongfully taken from them in the 1640s and '50s. On top of this, the Protestant dissenters in Ireland were likewise treated as second-class subjects.
Restoration history is the story of human tragedy. People were exploited, brutalized, persecuted, hounded to death by a regime that felt desperately insecure after two decades of civil war and republican rule. The tragedy – the suffering – reached its height during the years of the Tory Reaction. Charles II and his supporters would have justified their actions by claiming that they were merely defending the monarchy and the existing establishment in Church and state against those who wanted to bring both down again. After what had transpired in the 1640s and 50s, we can understand where they were coming from. To put it in modern-day parlance, they saw themselves as engaged in a war on terrorism. They would also have claimed that the terrorists were a small minority, and that the vast majority of the populations in all three kingdoms supported this war on terror. And in making such claims the government had a point: this was the reality of the situation, as far as the government saw it. Indeed, as this book has been at pains to emphasize, the islands of Great Britain and Ireland were bitterly divided places, where political and religious tensions ran deep. It would be overly melodramatic to proclaim that they contained societies at war with themselves, though on occasions they did: literally so in parts of Scotland, across the entire period; somewhat more than metaphorically so in England during the years of the Tory Reaction; while there were unresolved problems and tensions that cut deep into Irish society which made whatever equilibrium that was achieved seem inherently fragile and which from time to time were to erupt in open sectarian violence. For all Charles's skill in escaping from the political crisis that the monarchy faced by 1679–81, the royal physician had done little to heal the wounds which had been kept bleeding for so long, as he had promised he would do in his Declaration of Breda issued on the eve of his Restoration. If anything, the policies he pursued during his last years had made the wounds even deeper.
Yet Charles had devised a workable solution. He had made the monarchy strong – stronger than at any other time in the seventeenth century – and he had also successfully built up a considerable degree of goodwill towards the crown, in all three of his kingdoms, among those of his subjects who belonged to the Established Church. The quid pro quo for this was that Charles had had to promise that the monarchy would protect the existing government in Church and state as by law established – but for the time being this seemed a minor price to pay. He had seemingly placed the Stuart monarchy in a situation where it could even survive the succession of his Catholic brother and heir. At first it looked as if it would. Arguably it should have done. It did not. Within less than four years James II was gone. How and why this came about is the subject of the sequel to this book.