Restoration

Although the Restoration regime might appear, with hindsight, to have been inherently unstable, it had yet to be radically destabilized. What brought matters to a head were the revelations by Titus Oates, in the late summer of 1678, of a Popish Plot against both the King and his subjects. Oates – famously depicted in contemporary prints with his excessively elongated chin – was by all accounts a most unsavoury individual. His pastimes included lying, cheating, blasphemy and sodomizing young boys. Forced to leave Cambridge in disgrace and without a degree, he nevertheless contrived to enter Anglican orders, only to be subsequently dismissed from his living for drunken blasphemy. After a brief spell as a navy chaplain (to be dismissed this time for committing a homosexual act), he eventually decided to convert to Roman Catholicism, studying at the English College at Valladolid in Spain, which he was soon asked to leave, though before returning to England he was to award himself a doctorate from the University of Salamanca. His conversion was no doubt insincere, though it did, Oates was later to claim, gain him admission to the secret cabals of the Jesuits, which was how he supposedly came to be privy to the international conspiracy against the life of Charles II. It was all brilliant Oatesian fantasy, but by now practice had made Oates a rather convincing liar – not least, perhaps, because he was to tell people what they wanted (or feared) to hear.²

The story Oates had to tell was a self-consciously British one. The Jesuits were first to send priests disguised as Presbyterian ministers into Scotland to stir up those suffering under ‘Episcopal Tyranny’ into rebellion, and then raise a Catholic uprising in Ireland. With these two kingdoms in revolt, they would proceed to assassinate Charles II and burn London to the ground, prompting Catholics to rise up and massacre thousands of Protestants, with the ultimate goal of restoring the Roman Catholic faith in England.³ The narrative eerily mirrored the sequence of events of 1637 – 41 that had triggered the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642, and circumstantial evidence served to lend it credibility. For example, a Middlesex magistrate, Sir Edmundberry Godfrey, was mysteriously found dead (presumed murdered) in October 1678 after taking further depositions about the plot from Oates and his associate, Dr Israel Tonge.⁴ Some incriminating letters concerning the enhancement of Catholic interests, dating back to the mid-1670s, were found in the possession of the Duke of York's former secretary Edward Coleman, a Roman Catholic convert and one of the leading conspirators named by Oates. Then, in May – June 1679, some 8,000 covenanters actually did rise in rebellion – starting at Rutherglen, on the outskirts of Glasgow, though establishing their main camp at nearby Bothwell Bridge – to protest against their sufferings under the episcopal regime in Scotland. Alarmingly, Oates's predictions seemed to becoming true. Moreover, further investigations into the plot over the next couple of years were to reveal a supposed Irish dimension to the conspiracy.

There has been considerable debate in recent years over how we should understand the Exclusion Crisis. Some have even questioned whether the term ‘Exclusion Crisis’ is really appropriate, either because there was no real crisis,⁵ or because the crisis was not just – or even primarily – about Exclusion.⁶ This chapter will therefore be organized around two basic questions: what was the crisis about, and did the situation ever become critical for the government? For a long time, historians tended to see the Exclusion Crisis in somewhat one-dimensional terms: it was in essence about an imagined fear of what might happen in the future, should York become king, and the crisis therefore centred around whether or not parliament could exclude the Catholic heir from the succession.⁷ Representing the fear as imagined served to encourage the view that the response to the Popish Plot was hysterical; indeed, it has been described as ‘one of the most remarkable outbreaks of mass hysteria in English history’.⁸ This is clearly unsatisfactory. The Exclusion Crisis was not about one thing, but about several interrelated anxieties, all centring around the fear of popery and arbitrary government: about what would happen in England in the future under a popish successor; about the threat of popery, in the present, within England; about the current international situation, and especially about what was going on in France under Louis XIV; and about Charles II's style of government, not just in England but also in Scotland and Ireland. Although there were certainly imagined fears, and some people's imaginations (fuelled by Whig propaganda) perhaps had a tendency to run riot, there was also the perception of a very real threat in the present, belying any notion that the response was hysterical. The bulk of this chapter will therefore be dedicated to looking at what the fuss was all about: the nature of the Whig campaign; the concerns that the Whigs had (about both the future and the present, and about the domestic, the British and the international situations); and the remedies that they proposed. The final section will examine the extent to which the Whigs represented a significant challenge to the Restoration regime. The aim here will be to demonstrate the depth of the crisis into which Charles II's government had sunk by the late 1670s and from which it would need to extricate itself a crisis which, we shall see, was not purely English in nature but genuinely British in the making.

THE WHIG CAMPAIGN

Restoration scholars have stressed the need to rid ourselves of any notion that the first Whigs were a monolithic party, united behind the leadership of one man – the Earl of Shaftesbury – in pursuit of a single goal – Exclusion. Instead, we have come to recognize that the first Whigs were a broad church, comprising different factions or interests. Thus we can perhaps speak of a Shaftesbury–Russell interest (William Lord Russell being Shaftesbury's right-hand man in the Commons) committed to Exclusion and moderate constitutional reform; a more radical Sidney–Capel interest (the supporters of Algernon Sidney and the Earl of Essex, Arthur Capel), whose ideal would have been a republic; and a Monmouth interest, centring around the Protestant Duke of Monmouth and his personal followers such as Lord Colchester and Sir Thomas Armstrong, who wanted to switch the succession to the King's eldest illegitimate son – though even this is somewhat formulaic, since allegiances remained fluid as people pursued alternative strategies and alliances as they strove in their various ways to achieve their main concern: to rid England of the threat of popery and arbitrary government.⁹ Although Shaftesbury played an important leadership role – he drew up lists predicting how politicians would act in parliament, was a leading ideological spokesman for the Whig cause in the House of Lords, and was active in promoting the Whig agenda out-of-doors – he was not the leader of the Whigs; indeed, he often found himself at odds with other leading figures in the Whig movement, and did not always find it easy to persuade others to follow his initiatives. Many Whigs were politically quite conservative, simply wishing to preserve strong monarchy in England though keeping it in the Protestant line by diverting the succession. Others were constitutional reformists, bent on curtailing the powers of the monarch and exalting the powers of parliament. A few even hoped to make the monarchy elective or else transform the English government into a virtual commonwealth where the head of state was king in name only, though these were a small minority. Nor did all Whigs believe that passing an Exclusion Bill was the only way to rescue the land from popery and arbitrary government. Alternative solutions that came to be endorsed at various times by different groups of Whigs included limiting the powers of a popish successor, so that he could not be a threat to the Protestant establishment; establishing a regency during the lifetime of a popish successor; persuading the King to remarry, so he could father a legitimate heir; and trying to get Charles to declare his eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, legitimate. It has also been pointed out that the parliaments of 1679–81 spent relatively little time discussing whether or not to exclude the Catholic heir, but instead busied themselves with other issues that members deemed important – such as investigating the plot, trying to provide for national security at a time of imminent danger, combating perceived abuses of power by the court and the court's servants, promoting the cause of Protestant unity, and trying to safeguard the liberties of parliament and the subject. Moreover, the general elections of 1679–81 were not fought predominantly over the issue of Exclusion; other factors, such as court–country tensions, the issue of religious dissent, and local concerns were more important – certainly in the two general elections of 1679, and arguably in that of 1681 – while a study of the pamphlet literature of this period reveals a preoccupation with a diversity of issues over and above Exclusion.¹⁰

Such revisionist perspectives are of undoubted importance, and have served to provide a fuller and more realistic appreciation of the politics of 1679–81. They should not mislead us, however, into thinking that the Whigs lacked organization or that Exclusion was not an issue. One of the main reasons why the Whigs represented such a challenge to the royal administration was because, for an age that did not accept the legitimacy of partisan politics or of organized opposition to the crown, they appeared disturbingly well organized. Politicians gathered in clubs held in London's numerous coffee houses and taverns to coordinate tactics for the parliamentary session. There were twenty-nine clubs in London alone – including Shaftesbury's club at the Swan in Fish Street, Buckingham's at the Salutation Tavern in Lombard Street, and the famous Green Ribbon Club, which met at the King's Head Tavern in Chancery Lane – as well as numerous provincial clubs, in places such as Bristol, Buckingham, Newport (Essex), Norwich, Oxford, Taunton and York.¹¹ Although it would be wrong to convey the impression that the Whigs fought centrally coordinated campaigns at the three general elections of 1679–81, electoral agents were employed to promote the interests of Whig candidates at the polls, while Whig magnates such as Shaftesbury, Buckingham and Lords Wharton and Grey used what resources they could muster to procure the return of sympathetic MPs.¹² The Whings also launched a propaganda campaign designed to win over public opinion, and actively encouraged mass petitioning campaigns and public demonstrations in order to pressurize the government into acceding to their demands.

One of the most striking things about the Whig campaign is the extent of its reach. The Whigs made every effort to ensure that as many people as possible throughout the kingdom were apprised of the threat of popery and arbitrary government and educated about the things that might need to be done in order to avoid it. This was achieved through a brilliant exploitation of the media. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1679 led to the breakdown of pre-publication censorship, and as a result a host of printed artefacts began to pour forth from the presses. The number of books and pamphlets published annually shot up from about, 1,081 in 1677 and 1,174 in 1678 to 1,730 in 1679, 2,145 in 1680, and 1,978 in 1681.¹³ Taking into account contemporary print runs, somewhere between 5 and 10 million pamphlets must have been in circulation in the years 1679–81.¹⁴ There were also several Whig political periodicals and bi-weekly newspapers – such as Henry Care's Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome (which ran from December 1678 to July 1683); Benjamin Harris's Domestick Intelligence, later retitled The Protestant (Domestick) Intelligence (July 1679 to April 1681); Langley Curtis's True Protestant Mercury (December 1680 to October 1682); Richard Janeway's Impartial Protestant Mercury (December 1680 to October 1682); and Francis Smith's Protestant Intelligence (February–April 1681) – intended to keep readers alert to the nature of the popish threat and abreast of the latest foreign news and domestic developments. In addition to printed artefacts, there were manuscript newsletters which remained much in demand because they provided more complete and reliable news than the published bi-weeklies.¹⁵

Not that the media became totally unregulated with the lapsing of the Licensing Act. The government could still invoke the law of seditious libel in an attempt to silence opposition publicists. In the first half of 1680 a vigorous campaign conducted by Lord Chief Justice Sir William Scroggs led to the successful prosecution of a number of Whig publicists, including Care, Jane Curtis (Langley Curtis's wife), Smith and Harris. The last, for example, was fined £500 and sentenced to stand in the pillory for publishing An Appeal from the Country to the City, a tract that vividly rehearsed the horrors that English people could expect from a popish ruler and advocated Monmouth as an alternative successor to York.¹⁶ Regulating the press through the law of seditious libel proved of limited effectiveness, however. The courts could go after an author or publisher after a work had appeared in print, but by that time the damage had already been done, while taking legal action might only serve to give the work further publicity and provoke sympathy for the publicist who was being prosecuted. Harris, for example, was fêted by crowds when he stood in the pillory in the Old Exchange in London on 17 February 1680.¹⁷ Moreover, it became virtually impossible to bring successful prosecutions against London-based publicists following the election of two Whig sheriffs, Slingsby Bethel and Henry Cornish, in the summer of 1680; because sheriffs were responsible for empanelling juries in London and Middlesex, they could ensure that only those sympathetic to the Whig cause were chosen to serve.

The reach of Whig propaganda was undoubtedly very wide – both sociologically and geographically. The lengthier pamphlets, to be sure, would have been quite expensive and necessitated an advanced level of literacy in their readers. Newspapers and broadsides, on the other hand, were relatively cheap – typically costing just a penny – and written in a popular idiom so that they could easily be understood by those with limited literacy skills. People could also find the latest publications in pubs or at that ‘Great Pond or Puddle of News, the Coffee House’;¹⁸ indeed, the owners of such establishments found it necessary to provide the latest pamphlets for their customers in order to attract business. In other words, one did not need to be able to afford to buy news in order to be a consumer; often all that was needed was a thirst. Nor did one even need to be literate. The cheaper news-sheets and more down-market publications could easily be read aloud to those who could not read themselves. In addition, various propaganda devices were deployed that were not dependent upon literacy. There were visual materials such as satirical prints – both the more expensive copper-plate engravings and also the cheaper (and cruder) woodcuts – which might either stand alone or illustrate broadsides; some publishers even produced packs of playing cards illustrated with political prints. Then there was what one might call the performance media: both where the target audience was performed to and where they were involved in the actual performance. The clearest example of the former would be sermons – by nonconformist ministers in their conventicles; by those few Whig-leaning clergymen who were prepared to raise the alarm about the threat of popery from the pulpit; even by Titus Oates himself, who gave a number of guest sermons in London at this time.¹⁹ Whig playwrights used the London stage to convey pointed partisan messages to the theatre-going public, though there were also political plays put on at the London fairgrounds, such as the virulently anti-Catholic Coronation of the Queen Elizabeth, performed before the huge crowds that visited Bartholomew and Southwark fairs in 1680.²⁰ Then there were poems and ballads – large numbers of them – which might be performed by ballad singers or travelling musicians but which also could be learned by rote and recited by members of the public themselves. Last but not least we have the famous pope-burning processions staged in London on 17 November (the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's accession) between 1679 and 1681; these involved elaborate anti-Catholic pageants, acted out by ordinary Londoners, processing through the streets of the capital, and a spectacular finale which witnessed the burning of the pope's effigy before thousands of spectators at Temple Bar (in 1679 and 1680) or Smithfield (in 1681).²¹

It would certainly be misleading to give the impression that all this output was controlled by some sort of central party headquarters. There were writers and publishers who worked independently and who just wanted to make a living, being prepared to produce anything that they thought would sell. Nevertheless, there was some orchestration from above. Although Shaftesbury did not have the sort of control over the opposition press that was ascribed to him by his political opponents, he clearly was behind some of the polemical work that came out during the Exclusion Crisis, and he appears to have employed a small group of stationers to produce and distribute tracts.²² Some of the London clubs also played a role in coordinating the Whig propaganda efforts. The Green Ribbon Club, for example, sponsored the London pope-burnings of 17 November and other Whig demonstrations; the pageant of 1680 was said to have cost £2,500. It also gave a subsidy to Henry Care when he was temporarily imprisoned in October 1679 for his Weekly Pacquet.²³

Much of this material emanated from London, and it is probably fair to assume that the metropolitan population possessed the most heightened degree of political awareness at this time. Nevertheless, the impact was not limited to the metropolis. Lord Keeper Sir Francis North may have exaggerated when he claimed that the Whigs, through their network of coffee houses ‘where they vented news and libels… could entirely possess the city with what reports they pleased’ within twenty-four hours and spread them ‘all over the kingdom’ in less than a week, but his picture of how political news and propaganda was disseminated was essentially correct.²⁴ In September 1681, for example, the government uncovered a network of newsletter writers in London who busied themselves ‘composeing and writing… scandalous papers and letters’ which were then sent to the chief post house in Lombard Street for distribution to different parts of the kingdom.²⁵ In Bristol the nonconformists used to gather at Kimbar's coffee house to learn the latest news, spreading what they learned either by word of mouth or by distributing ‘Libells’ up and down the streets.²⁶ In Gloucester a local clergyman called Vernon was active in spreading what news he had learned from the newsletters sent to local coffee houses, sometimes using his pulpit to reproach the government. The fact that he had recently moved to the city to take up a position as a curate paying a mere £10 p.a., when he had two good livings elsewhere worth £400 p.a. between them, raised the suspicion that he was a planted agent.²⁷ In Stafford in 1680 – 81 a local apothecary named Thomas Gyles took on the job of dispersing Whig tracts in his neighbourhood, among them a printed copy of one of Shaftesbury's speeches in the Lords, which came to him through the post.²⁸ From 1682 we have a report of William Lord Russell and a group of London citizens and nonconformist ministers spreading ‘fears and jealousies of Popery and arbitrary government’ in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, circulating the latest tracts out of London and even reading extracts out loud for the edification of passers-by.²⁹ Loyalists, too, helped ensure that Whig propaganda made it to the provinces, since they were eager to read what the Whigs had to say even if they did not agree with it. According to an account from late 1682, ‘Factious Intelligences’ were regularly sent to Chichester, in Sussex, though ‘it was rather to admire at their Impudence, (and to see their folly), than to encourage such promoters of seditions’.³⁰ Whig materials also found their way into Scotland and Ireland, by a similar variety of means.³¹ It was difficult, in other words, to be alive and conscious in 1679–81 without being aware that the Whigs had a view that they were trying to get across. One might not agree with it (a point to which we shall return in subsequent chapters), but one was unlikely to be completely ignorant about it.

IMAGINING THE FUTURE

Why all this effort? What were the Whigs so worried about? The brief answer would be the threat of popery and arbitrary government. As such, they were deeply concerned about the prospect of a Catholic successor, and keen to pursue whatever measures they thought would best protect the Protestant religion and safeguard the interests of the King's subjects. The simplest way out of the dilemma, and the solution that came to appear most attractive to the majority of Whigs, was to exclude the Duke of York from the succession.

Concern over the Catholic succession was nothing new. The idea of Exclusion had first been mooted in 1674, while in 1677 the Earl of Danby had put forward a scheme of limitations as a way of trying to safeguard the Protestant establishment should York one day come to the throne.³² York suspected from the very start that the Popish Plot was a ploy to strike at him – an opinion the King himself seems to have shared.³³ And York was indeed soon to find himself under attack. In early November 1678 Shaftesbury moved in the Lords that York should be removed from all councils and public affairs, and a few days later the Commons considered addressing the King to remove the Duke from court. In a debate in the Commons on 4 November, William Sacheverell asked ‘whether the King and the Parliament may not dispose of the Succession of the Crown? and whether it be not Praemunire to say the contrary?’³⁴ The King tried to make a pre-emptive strike by informing both houses on 9 November that he would give the royal assent to any bills that would make them ‘safe in the reign of my successor, (so as they tend not to impeach the Right of Succession, nor the descent of the crown in the true line)’. It was reported in the streets, however, that Charles had declared in favour of choosing a Protestant successor or settling the succession on Monmouth, prompting bonfire celebrations throughout London as crowds gathered to drink Shaftesbury's and Monmouth's healths.³⁵

Exclusion was already in the air, then, by November 1678. But Charles's speech may have temporarily deterred further immediate attacks on his brother, and in any case the King chose to prorogue the Cavalier Parliament in December and dissolve it in January. Although the new parliament, which met in March 1679, did not immediately taken up the issue of Exclusion, its further investigations into the Popish Plot soon led to suspicions of York's complicity. Thus on 27 April the Commons resolved that ‘the Duke of Yorke's being a Papist, and the hopes of his coming to the Crown’ had given ‘the greatest Countenance and Encouragement to the present Conspiracy and Designes of the Papists against the King and Protestant Religion’, and on 11 May they at last introduced a bill to exclude York from the succession – though Charles was to prorogue and then dissolve this parliament too before the bill could come to anything.³⁶ A second Exclusion Bill was introduced into the next parliament in October 1680, although this was to be defeated by a vote in the Lords on 15 November. A third one made it into the ill-fated Oxford Parliament of March 1681, which sat for just eight days. Other methods were also tried to strike at the Catholic heir. Towards the end of June 1680 Shaftesbury and some fellow MPs brought an indictment against York for recusancy before a Middlesex grand jury at Hicks Hall; on this occasion, Scroggs discharged the grand jury three days before the end of the term, to prevent it from considering the indictment. In late November, following the defeat of the Exclusion Bill in the Lords, the London magistrates at the Old Bailey decided to follow up on the matter, summoned the Middlesex grand jury to reappear before them, and proceeded to present York for recusancy; this time the indictment was removed by certiorari to the court of King's Bench and the case was never tried.³⁷

Although it may be correct that parliament spent relatively little time discussing Exclusion, concern over the issue of the Catholic heir manifested itself in other debates, over seemingly unrelated issues. York himself – if the retrospective Life of James II is to be trusted – appears to have interpreted virtually everything these parliaments did as directed against him. Thus the Life notes how, following the failure of the second Exclusion Bill, the Commons began to ‘fall upon those who had lately espous'd his interest’, including Edward Seymour, one of York's staunchest defenders in the Commons, and the now Earl of Halifax, the man who had spoken most passionately against Exclusion in the debate in the Lords. Similarly, York saw the trial of the Catholic peer Lord Stafford in late 1680, for alleged complicity in the Popish Plot, and even the parliamentary debate over whether to vote funds for the garrison at Tangier, which some members castigated as ‘a nursery’ for papists, as but further attempts to damage his political interest and heighten public concerns about the prospect of a popish successor.³⁸ Contemporary accounts confirm that the main reason why the King and his parliaments remained at loggerheads in 1680–81 was because they differed ‘about the point of Exclusion’, as the latitudinarian clergyman John Tillotson reported to a friend in Paris in January 1681.³⁹

It should also be pointed out that passing an Exclusion Bill was not the only way of excluding York from the succession. Trying to persuade Charles to remarry (so that he could beget a Protestant heir), or to declare Monmouth legitimate, was just as much an attempt to exclude the Catholic heir, as far as contemporaries were concerned, as a bill barring him from the succession, while the idea of imposing limitations on a popish successor was a way of trying to find a solution to the succession crisis which would not necessitate York's ‘exclusion-ion. Thus there is no need, as some scholars have suggested, to rename the Exclusion Crisis; even if the crisis was ‘more a controversy over the succession problem and the political and constitutional implications of all the various expedients offered to solve it’, this is nevertheless just another way of saying that it was indeed about exclusion.⁴⁰ However, an Exclusion Bill came to be seen by most Was as the best solution for the simple reason that the alternatives were not viable. Charles was not going to divorce his wife, nor was he going to declare Monmouth legitimate. Schemes proposing some form of limitations on a popish successor, curtailing his powers so that it would be impossible for him to hurt the Protestant establishment, or even setting up a regency for the lifetime of a Catholic king, were taken more seriously, not least because Charles himself said he was prepared to entertain such solutions. Both Essex and Sidney backed limitations, for example, while the notion that it would not matter if England had a Catholic king if the powers of the monarchy were curtailed sufficiently to make the English king little more than a doge of Venice was touted by the classical republican theorist Henry Neville in his Plato Redivivus of 1681.⁴¹ Limitations may have held a particular appeal for the republican Whigs (or commonwealthsmen, as they were known); Halifax, who himself preferred limitations to Exclusion, supposedly tried to convince his republican friends that such limitations ‘brought us really into a commonwealth, as soon as we had a popish king over us’.⁴² However – as most Whigs recognized whatever the theoretical appeal, it was highly questionable whether any such limitations would be enforceable in practice, or whether York, once king, would not simply be able to ignore any constraints placed on his power which he had not agreed to. York himself opposed limitations, which he thought were ‘worse then the bill of exclusion’, as he told Clarendon in December 1680, because ‘this absolutly destroys for ever the monarchy’.⁴³ Likewise the Prince of Orange, whose wife was second in line to the throne and who was himself fourth in line, was against limitations because he feared that if any prerogatives were taken away from the crown they would never be returned once England had a Protestant king. Besides, Charles himself seems not to have been serious about limitations, and secretly assured Orange that he would never consent to them.⁴⁴ Whigs, at various times between 1679 and 1681, flirted with the idea of limitations, most came to recognize that such schemes were ‘only a snare’, as Sir William Jones put it in the Oxford Parliament – a mere trick to try to secure the succession by dividing the Exclusionists among themselves.⁴⁵

The concern over a popish successor certainly was based, in part, on an imagined fear about the future: what would happen if a Catholic – and this Catholic, in particular – became king? Would he seek to overturn the Reformation? Would Protestants be allowed to worship freely, or would they be condemned to die as heretics if they refused to convert back to Rome? What would happen to those former church lands sold off to the gentry following the dissolution of the monasteries? The reason why William Lord Russell, Whig MP for Bedfordshire, was such a staunch supporter of Exclusion was because most of his estate was from the lands of dissolved monastic institutions, such as the abbeys of Tavistock (Devon) and Woburn (Bedfordshire) and the monastery of Thorney (Cambridgeshire).⁴⁶ How would a Catholic king impose his will on a Protestant nation? It seemed unlikely that he would be able to work with parliament, so he would have to rule with a standing army. Gone, therefore, would be English political liberties.⁴⁷ Whig poet and playwright Elkanah Settle predicted that a popish king would ‘find sufficient Assistance from the Pope, English Papists, and Foreign Princes’ to enable him to rule without parliament and would also raise a standing army, ‘ready to cut our Throats at home, if we do not submit, and give all that this King shall ask. And then’, Settle continued, ‘his Revenue may be as great as he and his Popish Counsellors shall think fit to make it.’ In short, the people of England would face from a popish successor ‘certain Prospect… of the ruine of their Estates, Lives, and Liberties’.⁴⁸

The case against a popish successor was based in part on history. Pamphleteers repeatedly harped on the atrocities allegedly committed against Protestants under England's last Catholic monarch, Mary Tudor (r. 1553–8). One author recalled that ‘the last time when Popery Reign'd amongst us’ not only were ‘many of our Laity… torn to pieces, and tied to a Stake in the midst of flames at Smithfield, and other places’, but ‘our Divines were butchered by the Name of Heretick Dogs, our Houses plundered, our Wives and Daughters ravished’, and ‘our Churches… converted into the Temples or Places of Idolatry and Superstition’.⁴⁹ MPs similarly appealed to the public memory of Mary's reign in parliamentary debate. It was essential to pass the Exclusion Bill, Hugh Boscawen argued in the Commons on 2 November 1680, to avoid being ‘hauled to Smithfield’. In return for their support against Lady Jane Grey in 1553, Mary had promised the Protestants of East Anglia she would not alter religion, Colonel Silius Titus recalled, ‘but when she came to the Crown, she burnt them… and for the Crown of England she gave them a Crown of Martyrdom.’⁵⁰ Then there were the subsequent attempts by the forces of international Catholicism to strike at the English monarchy and destroy the Protestant establishment in Church and state – most famously with the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Finally, there was the Great Fire of London of September 1666, the blame for which had officially been laid at the Catholics’ door; indeed, a French Catholic had confessed to having started the conflagration. In 1681 London Lord Mayor Sir Patience Ward had a plaque attached to the Monument constructed on the site where the fire had started explaining how ‘the most Dreadful Burning of this Protestant City’ had been ‘Begun on by the Treachery and Malice of the Papists’.⁵¹

Whig polemicists also recalled events overseas, especially the terrible atrocities allegedly perpetrated against Protestants in Germany during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). One tract, ominously entitled England's Calamity, recollected how during the 1630s Catholics had roasted Protestants alive, mutilated and tortured them, devoured young infants, and deflowered virgins. It also contained two prints: one showing ‘Protestants burning for the true Christian Religion’, the other depicting Catholics inflicting various other ‘devilish torments’, such as raping wives and daughters, and smashing the heads of little children against walls.⁵² Closer to home, there was the example of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Sir John Temple's famous history of The Irish Rebellion, which had first appeared in 1646 and was republished in 1679, was not only highly readable but also carried considerable conviction, since the author provided abundant source citations to support his claims and made powerful use of testimonies given on oath before the commissioners set up to investigate the rebellion in the early 1640s. Containing gruesome accounts of the alleged atrocities perpetrated on Protestants by Catholics, it made the wildly exaggerated claim that some 300,000 Protestants had been either killed or driven from the kingdom as a result of the rebellion.⁵³ The same year saw the publication of the self-explanatory A Collection of Certain Horrid Murthers in Several Counties of Ireland. Committed since the 23. of Octobr. 1641, which alleged that some 150,000 Protestants had died at the hands of Catholic rebels,⁵⁴ while in 1680 Edmund Borlase published his own, fully documented History, taking the story up to the Act of Settlement of 1662 and outlining in an appendix the number of murders in the several counties of Ireland since 23 October 1641.⁵⁵ Such works were intended to instruct ‘this present age in what they are to expect from Popery, by the sad experience of the last generation’,⁵⁶ and the persevering reader would have come away with an image of the Irish, to quote from Borlase's account, as ‘wild Beasts of the Wilderness’, bent on ‘the utter extirpation of the English nation, and Protestant Religion’ out of Ireland, and guilty of ‘execrable Cruelties… and cruel Deaths’ by ‘Strip[p]ing, Starving, Burning, Strangling, [and] Burying alive’.⁵⁷ naturally appealed to the example of the Irish Rebellion when making the case for Exclusion. As Boscawen put it in the Commons on 2 November 1680, it was impossible to think of the Catholics as ‘disciples of Christ’, when they had ‘murdered so many good Christians, and committed that Massacre in Ireland, where the Government was Protestant’ - though Boscawen was to exceed even Temple in putting the number of Protestants killed at ‘some four hundred thousands’.⁵⁸

In addition to the lessons of history, there was the contemporary example of France, the major Catholic power in Europe. Exclusionists insisted that English Protestants would be naive to expect they could be safe under a popish successor – after all, Louis XIV showed no desire to protect the civil and religious liberties guaranteed to his Protestant subjects under the terms of the Edict of Nantes (1598). Pamphlets and newspapers documented the plight of the Huguenots for the benefit of the reading public, while Huguenot refugees fleeing to England and Ireland in the face of persecution (there was already a steady stream before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685) brought with them ‘dismall storys of the inhumanitys excerysed upon them’.⁵⁹ Persecution had started at the beginning of Louis XIV's personal rule in 1661, but had intensified from the late 1670s: Protestant churches and schools were shut down; Huguenots were denied the right to hold civil office, exercise certain professions, or even practise their trades; they were subject to higher taxes; their children were taken from them and placed in Catholic boarding schools; and relapsed converts were to have their estates seized. Then from 1681 began the dragonnades, the practice of billeting troops on Huguenot families, at free quarter, in the hope that a combination of economic privation and physical intimidation might induce conversions.⁶⁰ Yet, if Whig propaganda was to be believed, Louis XIV's Catholic subjects were not much better off. One pamphlet, purporting to be a letter written by an English gentleman in Paris, proclaimed that ‘the Government of France’ was ‘an Absolute Monarchy, imposed upon the People by a standing, illegal and oppressive Army’: ‘the Nobility of all sorts’ were ‘very much Oppress'd’; ‘the Clergy’ were ‘also overawed’; the trading classes of the towns suffered from heavy impositions; and the peasantry, ‘out of that little which belonged to them… paid near two Thirds to the King’.⁶¹ Another pamphleteer observed ‘how the French King, a Popish King, levyes Arbitrary Taxes at his pleasure, and imposes several other Tyrannical Oppressions’, and reminded his (English Protestant) readers that ‘the Pope and Papists’ were their ‘mortal Enemies, and would fain Reign and Domineer over this Kingdom in the same nature as the French King doth in France’.⁶²

That was why Whigs insisted that ‘popery and slavery, like two sisters’, went ‘hand in hand’, as Shaftesbury famously put it in a speech in the Lords in March 1679.⁶³ English Protestants were repeatedly reminded of the horrors that would befall them should a Catholic come to the throne. ‘First, Imagine you see the whole Town in a flame, occasioned this second time, by the same Popish malice which set it on fire before,’ Charles Blount warned in his influential Appeal from the Country of 1679. ‘At the same instant fancy, that amongst the distracted Crowd, you behold Troops of Papists, ravishing your Wives and Daughters, dashing your little Childrens brains out against the walls, plundering your Houses and cutting your own throats, by the Name of Heretic Dogs… Also, casting your eye towards Smithfield, imagine you see your Father, or your Mother, or some of your nearest and dearest Relations, tyed to a Stake in the midst of flames.’⁶⁴ If people did not get the message from reading the Whig press, they might from looking at a Whig print. Thus A Prospect of a Popish Successor (1681) showed a figure, ‘Mack’ (for Irish Catholic), who was half devil and half Duke of York, burning Protestants at the stake and firing the city of London. Or else they might hear it at the hustings. One of the candidates at the County Durham election for the second Exclusion Parliament told voters before the poll ‘about the jails, Inquisition, and French mercenaries that a Catholic King would employ against Protestants’.⁶⁵ They might see it in a play, either in a theatre or at a fair, or hear it in a song. And they were regularly reminded of what Catholicism stood for in sermons delivered on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot and on other occasions, as they had long been. Thus in a sermon preached on 5 November 1673, though not published until 1679, Isaac Barrow (master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a royal chaplain) called for Protestants to ‘confide in God for his gracious preservation… from Romish Zeal and Bigotry’, which Barrow saw as ‘the mint of woful Factions and Combustions, of treasonable Conspiracies, of barbarous Massacres, of horrid Assassinations, of intestine Rebellions, of foreign Invasions, of savage Tortures and Butcheries’.⁶⁶ The gap between delivery and publication – Barrow himself had died in 1677 – hints at the timelessness of the sentiment expressed; if anything, the message seemed more pertinent in the context of 1679. Preaching on the anniversary of the regicide in 1681, one cleric, after first reminding his auditors that on this day ‘such a blot [was] cast on England, as she be glad it [be] forgot to posterity’, then proceeded to forget the day himself and discuss ‘our just, our great and scarce enough great detestation and abhorrency of Popery’:

Popery, that silly, that foolish, that cruell Religion, a Religion which changes soe many of its professors into blood sucking leeches… a Religion that joys in murthers by retayle, but not satisfied without whole sale Massacres, a Religion that hopes at this day to turne the whole Christian world into an Aceldama, a field of blood, a Golgotha, a place of sculls etc. every where burying Protestants in heaps. If popery prevayle then stabbing, tearing out bowels will be every where practicd, then we shall be not only forsaken, turned out, but to be burnt, hangd, gibbets our portion, if popery prevayle the pavements sprinkled with children's blood, and walls besmeared with enfant's brains.

The prose is rough, because we are dependent upon sermon notes for our account; it nevertheless conveys well the frenetic nature of the clergyman's delivery. And he said all this, he claimed, not to make popery more bloody than it was, for ‘who reads history of Waldenses, butchery of Paris, the cruelty of the Marion dayes, the bloodynesse of the Irish destruction, and the vaunts, threats, designes of these present plotters, will soon conclude worse cannot be sayd of them than they deserve.’⁶⁷

It was one thing to warn of the dangers of a popish successor; it was quite another to demonstrate that anything could be done about it in an hereditary monarchy. Whigs deployed a wide range of arguments to try to justify parliament's right to alter the succession, some based on history, others on an appeal to natural law. In parliament itself, supporters of Exclusion sought to show that parliament had altered the succession on many occasions in the past, from Richard II's deposition in 1399 through to the reign of Henry VIII. Yet what appeared the most telling precedent was the Elizabethan statute of 1571, likewise enacted in a climate of concern about the possibility of a popish successor, which made it treason (during the queen's lifetime, and praemunire ever after) to deny ‘That the Queen, by authority of Parliament’, could ‘limit and bound the Succession of the Crown’. This proved, as Paul Foley put it in the Commons on 11 May 1679, that king, Lords, and Commons could ‘exclude any man from the Crown’.⁶⁸ Quoting the statute of 1571, Whig journalist Henry Care concluded in 1681 that parliament had the power ‘to order the Right to the Crown’ and ‘had very frequently undertaken and actually Limited the same, Contrary to and different from the Common Line of Succession’.⁶⁹ The Whig lawyer John Somers sought to provide the scholarship to back up such claims in his Brief History of the Succession of 1680, where he showed that parliament had frequently meddled with the succession and concluded therefore that ‘the Parliament of England had an unquestionable power to limit, restrain, and qualify the Succession as they pleased.’⁷⁰

Yet, even if there were no precedents to support the case for the Exclusion Bill, the Whigs felt that ‘the law of nature and self-preservation would afford us sufficient arguments,’ as MP Hugh Boscawen typically put it in the debate on Exclusion in November 1680.⁷¹ Monarchy was ‘far from being de Jure Divino’, one pamphleteer asserted, ‘but ariseth by consent’; and the reason why people entered civil society was to secure ‘the publick good’. It therefore followed ‘that the succession is transferable, when the publick safety requires it’.⁷² ‘The King, Lords and Commons have a Power to dispose of the Succession as they shall judge most conducible to the Safety, Interest, and Happiness of the Kingdom,’ another author insisted; ‘and… he is His Majesties Heir and Successor, upon whom the whole Legislative Power shall think meet to settle the Inheritance of the Crown.’⁷³ The safety of the people demanded that in this instance the succession be breached. Salus populi, suprema lex (‘The safety of the people is the supreme law’) became a key Whig catchphrase; it appeared prominently on the title page of Blount's famous Appeal from the Country of 1679, and was invoked time and time again by Whig pamphleteers.

Most Whigs explicitly championed the theory of coordination, claiming that the king was but one of the three estates and shared his sovereignty with the Lords and Commons. They also embraced the myth of England's ancient constitution, alleging that the rights of parliament dated back to times immemorial.⁷⁴ Parliament's authority was justified on the grounds that parliament was the representative of the people. Ultimately, this placed sovereignty in the people themselves, and led to the view that government was based on consent. ‘Every form of Government’, Thomas Hunt wrote in 1680, ‘is of our Creation and not Gods, and must comply with the safety of the people in all that it can.’ In answer to the question ‘whence the Parliament derives their Power’, Hunt boldly proclaimed, ‘from the same Original the King derives his’, namely ‘from the Consent of the People in the first Constitution of the Government’. No government could be safe ‘without a Power to exclude a Person inhabil in Nature to support it, or of one Principled to destroy it’ (i.e. a popish successor), since it was impossible to ‘imagine a Government which is of Humane Contrivance, to be without a Power to Preserve itself’. Hunt nevertheless insisted that this was an emergency power only, and did not make England an elective monarchy and certainly not a republic: ‘our case will never be Cromwels’.⁷⁵ The author of a Dialogue at Oxford encapsulated the typical Whig view when he asserted that ‘only Government in general is of Divine Right’; ‘the particular Forms and Limitations of it’ were ‘from humane Compact’, or contract (the author used both terms), which established that ‘the common Good of Humane Societies’ was ‘the First and Last End of all Government’.⁷⁶ This was certainly a radical position, as contemporaries understood the term, since it placed power ‘Radically and Originally in the People’, as the Tory press complained.⁷⁷

Typically, those who defended Exclusion felt the need to insist that they were not seeking constitutional innovation, claiming that they did not want to change the nature of the monarchy, but only to keep the succession in the Protestant line.⁷⁸ The Earl of Huntingdon might not have been completely correct when he said in a debate in the Lords on 15 November 1680 that there was ‘not a man in this House’ who supported the Exclusion Bill who was ‘not most zealous for the support of this monarchy and the King in his royal prerogatives’, but he was undoubtedly accurately representing the typical rhetorical posturing that Whig spokesmen found it wise to adopt at this time.⁷⁹ Nevertheless, two qualifications need to be made before we allow ourselves to take Whig self-professions of constitutional conservatism at face value. First, although the Whigs may have been careful about what they said or wrote in the present, they had fewer qualms about letting parliamentary spokesmen from the Civil War era make their case for them. Most significant in this respect was the republication in 1680 of Philip Hunton's Treatise of Monarchy of 1643, which set out to show that the English monarchy was limited, not absolute, based as it was on contract and the consent of the governed, and that the three estates of the realm had the right to resist a king who degenerated into tyranny.⁸⁰ Second, the way that the Whigs of the Exclusion Crisis came to articulate their case – however carefully they trod or circumscribed their claims – was nevertheless deeply subversive of the Cavalier-Anglican view of the constitution, involving, as it did, a denial of conventional notions of divine-right monarchy, and implying that the king was beneath the law, accountable to parliament, and that ultimately the people were sovereign. The king of England, the author of Vox Populi; Or, the People's Claim insisted, ‘has no Prerogative, but what the Law gives him’; he is ‘a king whilst he Rules well, but a Tyrant when he Oppresses’. As the famous medieval jurist Henry de Bracton had taught, ‘The Common Law doth allow many Prerogatives to the King, yet it doth not allow any, that He shall wrong, or hurt any by His Prerogative.’ Therefore kings, this same author continued, should use their power or prerogative only ‘for the Preservation and Interest of the People. And not for the disappointing the Councils of a Parliament’; indeed, ‘whenever it is applied to frustrate those ends, it is a Violation of Right, and Infringment of the King's Coronation Oath, who is obliged to Pass or Confirm those Laws His People shall chuse.’⁸¹ Another author, likewise following Bracton, insisted that ‘The Law bounds, and limits the King's Power,’ and then, taking his cue from the late medieval constitutional theorist Sir John Fortescue, proclaimed that the king cannot ‘Govern his People by any other Power, than the Law’. To be sure, the king's ministers ‘may act illegally’, and if so ‘they are Lyable to answer for it; but he [the king] can do nothing but what the Law Directs and Justifies’, since not only is he bound by his coronation oath, ‘but his own Greatness, and his very Prerogative, as having their Foundations in the Law, oblige him to it.’ In short, this writer concluded, ‘the fundamental constitution of the Land’ as much ‘limits the Prerogative of the King’ as it ‘fixeth the Rights, Liberties, and Authority of Lords and Commons’.⁸² Responding to the court charge that the Whigs were ‘lovers of Commonwealth Principles’, Sir William Jones and Algernon Sidney wrote that, if by this was meant ‘men passionately devoted to the Publick good, and to the common service of their Country, who believe That Kings were instituted for the good of the People, and Government ordained for the sake of those that are to be governed’, then ‘every Wise and Honest Man will be proud to be ranked in that number.’ This did not mean, they continued, that they were for ‘setting up a Democratical Government, in opposition to our legal Monarchy’, but the point was that the English monarchy was a legal one. As Bracton had said, ‘It is from the Law that he [the king] hath his Power; it is by the Law that he is King, and for the good of the people by whose consent it [the law] is made.’ Indeed, ‘all his Commands that are contrary to Law, are void,’ which was ‘the true Reason of that well known Maxim, that the King can do no wrong’. For ‘the essential principle of the English Monarchy’, they averred, was ‘that well proportioned distribution of Powers, whereby the Law doth at once provide for the greatness of the King, and the safety of the People’, adding that ‘the Government can subsist no longer, than whilst the Monarch enjoying the Power which the Law doth give him, is enabled to perform the part it allows unto him and the People are duly protected in their Rights and Liberties.’⁸³

The implication was clear. If the king ceased to rule according to law or to protect the rights and liberties of the people, he ceased to be a lawful ruler and his subjects were no longer obliged to obedience. Indeed, a number of authors explicitly challenged traditional Tory-Anglican teachings on passive obedience, cautiously arguing a case for the possibility of defensive resistance in the event of a popish successor. Clerical Whigs – that is, those in Anglican orders (there were few of them, but they made a significant contribution to this debate) – felt obliged to uphold the Church's standard position that the king himself (even a Catholic one) was sacred and could not be harmed; nevertheless, they suggested that it would be legitimate to resist those who acted illegally in the name of the king. Thus Edmund Hickeringill, rector of All Saints, Colchester, maintained that, if a magistrate acted against the law, he acted not like a magistrate, but as a robber. Would the Tory clergy, he asked, ‘perswade us to bind our own Hands 'till our Throats be cut, by Hectors and Tories, against Law, and that It is Divinity so to do’? He would ‘rather dye than be a Rebel’, Hickeringill protested, but then he did not think taking up arms to remove evil counsellors from the king was rebellion.⁸⁴ Similarly, Samuel Johnson, rector of Corringham in Essex and chaplain to the Whig leader William Lord Russell, wrote a stinging attack on the doctrine of passive obedience in his Julian the Apostate of 1682; that doctrine, he alleged, was ‘calculated and fitted on purpose for the use of a Popish Successor, and to make us an easier Prey to the Bloody Papists’. Claiming that ‘the Laws of a Man's Country’ were ‘the measures of all Civil Obedience’, he insisted (following Bracton) that a king who failed to act ‘according to Law’ was no longer ‘God's Vicegerent’. He had no gripe with Charles II, whose reign, he hoped, God would prolong, but he feared the worst under a popish successor, who (he predicted) would persecute Protestants unto death. However, we had ‘our Religion nestled by such Laws as cannot be altered without our own consent’, Johnson pointed out, and a popish successor had ‘no Authority to exercise any illegal Cruelty upon Protestants’: ‘an Inauthoritative Act, which carries no Obligation at all’, cannot, he proclaimed, ‘oblige Men to Obedience’. It was true, Johnson conceded, that by the laws of England ‘this Popish Prince, when he is lawfully possesst of the Crown’, would be ‘inviolable and unaccountable, as to his own Person, and ought by no means to have any violence offered to him’. Yet bad princes were rarely the executioners of their own cruelty, and it was possible to resist those who acted illegally in the king's name: ‘We readily acknowledge, that no Inferior Magistrate is to be resisted in the exercise of his Office, so far as he is warranted by Law; but illegal Force may be repelled by Force.’⁸⁵

Lay Whigs, however, were more willing to embrace the possibility that the Catholic monarch himself might be resisted. One author, writing in 1679 about whether people were obliged to be loyal to the Catholic successor, insisted that fidelity was ‘due by nature to the Prince, so long as he lives and intends the publick good’, but added, ‘When he declines from that, Querie, for then I am bound patiently to let him Cut my Throat, if he will, which is repugnant to the Law of Nature, which Commands my preservation, which was perhaps the reason why the Barons in King Johns time took up Arms for their liberties.’ The awkward syntax reveals the sensitivity of the subject – this was, after all, treasonous – and the author declined to discuss it further.⁸⁶ Elkanah Settle, in 1681, admitted that people were ‘bound indeed by [their] Oaths of Allegiance, to a Constant Loyalty to the King and his lawful Successours’, but were not bound to be ‘his lawful Successour's… Loyal Slaves’. Besides, he asked:

how is an Arbitrary absolute Popish Tyrant any longer a lawful Successour to a Protestant establisht and bounded Government, when lawfully succeeding to this limited Monarchy, he afterwards violently, unlawfully, and tyrannically over-runs the due bounds of power, dissolves the whole Royal constitution of the Three Free-States of England, and the Subjects Petition of Right? Whilst wholly abandoning those Reins of Government which were his lawful birthright, and making new ones of his own illegal creation, he makes us neither those Free-born Subjects we were when we took that oath, nor himself that King we swore to be Loyal to.

Even ‘the most vehement Disputants against the Peoples Right of defending themselves’, Settle continued, ‘must at least acknowledge thus much, that whenever a Popish King shall by Tyranny establish the Pope's Jurisdiction in England, undoubtedly in the Eye of God he is guilty of a greater Sin, than that people can be, that with open Arms oppose that Tyranny.’ The conclusion was clear: ‘The People of England, in taking Arms against that Tyranny, defend a just Right, viz. their Religion, Lives and Liberties.’⁸⁷

It is easy to see how such arguments could be extended to apply not just to ministers of the crown or to a future Catholic monarch, but to the current Protestant one. Indeed, by late 1682 or early 1683 Johnson's patron, Lord Russell, was heavily involved in the radical Whig intrigues against the government of Charles II and the Catholic succession known by the umbrella term the Rye House Plot. Moreover, it was at this time that John Locke wrote his famous Two Treatises of Government, the second treatise of which sought to establish that it was legitimate to resist the illegal government of Charles II and that this right to resist inhered in every single individual. Such a radical stance was forced on the Whigs by desperate circumstances – there was no alternative to resistance by 1682–3 – and even then only a minority of the more extreme Whigs were prepared to engage in active resistance to the present regime. The point is that the potential for such a radicalization was always implicit within the types of argument that the Whigs sought to deploy in order to justify their stance against a Catholic successor.

Exclusion would have favoured Princess Mary, James's eldest child and the wife of William of Orange (James's nephew), not Monmouth. The first Exclusion Bill stated that upon Charles II'ss death the crown should devolve upon that person who was the ‘next Lawful Heir’ and who had ‘always been truly and professedly of the Protestant Religion now established by Law within this Kingdom, as if the said Duke of York were actually dead’.⁸⁸ Initially the second Exclusion Bill simply provided for the exclusion of James and remained silent about the succession – a form of wording favoured by Monmouth's friends, since it potentially left the way open for parliament to settle the throne on Monmouth at some future date – though it was modified in the committee stage to specify that the succession should descend to that person who would have inherited ‘in case the Duke were dead’, making it clear, once more, that Mary was parliament's preferred alternative. The third Exclusion Bill, introduced into the short-lived Oxford Parliament of 1681, returned to the ambiguous wording of the first draft of the second bill, though, since the bill never reached the committee stage, there is no telling whether this wording would have survived.⁸⁹

Whig attitudes towards Monmouth were, in fact, ambivalent. For most, he was not the ideal alternative to York: he lacked political experience, was not particularly intelligent, and was too eager to retain the favour and affections of his father. In the early months of the Exclusion Crisis, Monmouth remained firmly identified with the court. In 1678 Shaftesbury had labelled him ‘very very vile’ when drawing up a list of the political sympathies of those who sat in the Cavalier Parliament; Monmouth sided with the court in opposing the attempted impeachment of Danby in December 1678; and Shaftesbury regarded those associates of Monmouth who were returned to sit in the first Exclusion Parliament as among his political opponents.⁹⁰ Yet Monmouth did not get along with his Catholic uncle, and the personal feud between the two men deepened as the Exclusion Crisis progressed. Moreover, ‘the Protestant Duke’, as Monmouth came to be styled, was extremely popular with the masses, as the demonstrations of November 1678 had already revealed – and this popularity was enhanced by the role he played in the investigations into the Popish Plot and by his soon being named as an intended victim of the plot himself. There had been talk in the past that Monmouth might be declared legitimate, and now stories began to circulate, with the help of the Whig press, that Charles had secretly married Monmouth's mother while in exile in the late 1640s and early 1650s and that the marriage certificate had been secreted in a ‘black box’ once belonging to the late Bishop of Durham, if only that could be found.⁹¹ Charles was quick to deny all such rumours, but, concerned about Monmouth's growing popularity, he decided to send his son into temporary exile in Utrecht in September 1679. When Monmouth returned against his father's wishes towards the end of November, Charles had little option but to disgrace his son by stripping him of most of his offices. With the growing estrangement between Monmouth and his father from late 1679 onward, the Duke became increasingly identified with the opposition interest. Those who opposed York's succession needed to keep all their options open, and Monmouth did appear attractive for a number of reasons: as the King's son, he had a potential claim to the succession in his own right; he was popular, and might be a more acceptable king than Mary's husband, William of Orange; shifting the succession in his favour might provide the opportunity for introducing various constitutional reforms and establishing a more limited monarchy than if the succession had simply passed to William and Mary; and, finally, if parliamentary attempts at Exclusion were to fail, then Monmouth would be an ideal person – given his military experience and his following among the masses – to spearhead an armed resistance movement. Yet it would be misleading to imply that the Whigs started to promote him as their preferred successor; Shaftesbury himself always remained suspicious of Monmouth's intentions and trustworthiness, and Monmouth's main ambition at this time was probably to get his offices back and be restored to his father's favour.⁹²

FEARING THE PRESENT

What we have been documenting so far is an imagined fear about a threat of popery and arbitrary government in the future, should York become king. It is important to recognize, however, that there was also a perceived threat of popery and arbitrary government in the present. Englishmen had cause to be concerned not just about what might come to pass, one day, but about what was actually going on right then.

The Catholic Menace

One concern was over what Catholics within England might be up to, particularly in those areas that had disproportionately large Catholic populations. In the provinces in late 1678 rumours circulated of stashes of arms found in papists’ houses and of suspicious nocturnal gatherings by those of the Catholic faith.⁹³ Sometimes local Catholics made provocative gestures. At Snaith in the West Riding of Yorkshire in November 1678 two men (one a Catholic priest) and a woman, when visiting the local church, horrified the sexton by boasting that mass would be said there soon.⁹⁴ More generally, the revelations of the Popish Plot often served to bring a history of Protestant–Catholic antagonisms in certain communities to the fore, as they did, notably, in South Wales and the border counties of the Welsh marches.⁹⁵ There was a particularly acute sense of panic in London, which not only contained the largest concentration of Catholics in the country, but which also had been singled out by Oates as the prime target for Catholic incendiarists. In the third week of November 1678 a bookseller in St Paul's Churchyard found a letter addressed to the ‘pitifull silly’ Protestants of London, warning that before Christmas the Catholics would make their ‘blood lye thick on the ground’, and that perhaps they might have ‘a hott day before Christmas in London’ – one ‘as hott as the third of September 1666’ (the day of the Great Fire).⁹⁶ Any fire that chanced to break out in London over the next couple of years raised suspicions that the Catholics were to blame.⁹⁷ Londoners became so enraged ‘against the Papists’, the Puritan divine Richard Baxter recalled, that they began to keep ‘private Watches in all streets… to save their houses from firing’.⁹⁸ Charles II tried to calm fears by issuing a series of proclamations ordering all the existing laws against Catholics to be enforced, calling for the removal of Catholics from within 10 miles of London, and requiring all recusants to be disarmed and to take out recognizances to keep the peace. Many communities across England ordered a strengthening of the night watch and began a stricter enforcement of the penal laws against the local Catholic population; conviction rates for recusancy shot up as a result, albeit temporarily. Yet, rather than calming local anxieties, such measures only added to the general sense of panic that was rapidly engulfing the nation.⁹⁹

There was also an international threat in the present from Catholic powers, particularly France. As the London merchant William Lawrence noted in his diary in early 1679, what was feared, besides the papists, was ‘the power of the French’.¹⁰⁰ And with good reason. To the English, Protestantism had appeared to be on the retreat throughout much of Europe in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, thanks to the successes of the Counter-Reformation powers in the wars of religion and the Thirty Years War. The last strongholds of Protestantism in north-west Europe were now the Stuart kingdoms of England and Scotland and the United Provinces, and they faced in France an aggressive neighbour with clear expansionist ambitions.¹⁰¹ Not only had Charles done little to meet this threat, he actually appeared to be in league with Louis XIV. As Lawrence pointed out, ‘by a great errour in our politicks’ the French had been allowed ‘to rival our naval Forces’. It was undeniable that the French kings had ‘long gap't after the Universal Empire (at least of Europe)’, and Louis XIV looked like acquiring it if England did not do something to ‘retard his hasty motion’. Indeed, under the terms of the Treaty of Nijmegen, agreed in July 1678, Louis not only had made peace with his continental European enemies but had gained considerable territories along his north-eastern frontiers, and it seemed logical to assume that England was next on his list. England therefore needed ‘an early War with this mighty Monarck’, Lawrence concluded, ‘before he hath got more ports and encreas't his naval power’, otherwise he would be able first ‘to ruine the strength and Trade’ of this island, then invade and subdue it.¹⁰² Many English Protestants – especially those living near the south coast – became gripped with fear of an imminent French invasion. Sir Edward Dering, MP for Hythe (one of the Cinque Ports), recorded how in Kent ‘all men’ were ‘affrighted’ that ‘a French armie would land’ and cut ‘their throats… in their beds’.¹⁰³ At the end of the first week of December a report began to circulate that ‘great numbers of men’ had landed in the Isle of Purbeck in Dorsetshire;¹⁰⁴ it proved a false alarm, but within a few days a letter had carried the news to London, affirming ‘that 1000 or 1500 french were landed’,¹⁰⁵ while those who lived in Somerset heard ‘that an Army of 40,000 French’ had landed at Weymouth.¹⁰⁶ ‘Rumours and feares of a French Invasion’ continued through the early months of 1679, and by the spring reports were rife that Louis XIV was assembling a huge invasion force in Brittany ‘to be transported into England to assist the Catholicks’.¹⁰⁷ MPs likewise feared the possibility of a French invasion. Thus in the Commons on 14 April 1679 Sir William Coventry, noting that Louis XIV was not disbanding his troops, despite having recently made peace with Holland and Spain, predicted that he was intending to employ them ‘upon us’.¹⁰⁸ English xenophobia tended not to be particularly discriminating, it should be pointed out; the public were also concerned about the French already in England, the vast majority of whom were Protestants (many having fled religious persecution), because it was feared they took jobs away from English workers. Thus in 1679 the author of England's Alarm, while calling for action against the French king lest he soon be crowned king in England, also urged Charles II ‘to extirpate out of your Royal Territories, and this City of London, all those Amalekites that trouble Israel, (I mean the French) that devour and eat the bread out of your Subjects mouths’.¹⁰⁹

Whether Charles could be trusted to pursue England's true foreign-policy interests became a grave cause for concern. In late 1678, as inquiries into the Popish Plot got under way, the Commons learned the stunning news that the reason why Charles had been able to prorogue parliament so frequently in recent years was that he had been receiving a pension from the French king.¹¹⁰ Rumours abounded that Charles was actually working in league with Louis XIV for the promotion of a shared agenda. In mid-January 1679 a paper was found in the Royal Exchange in London, purportedly written by a former Catholic who was privy to all the details of the Popish Plot, revealing that Charles had taken a £600,000 bribe from Louis XIV so that he could get rid of the Cavalier Parliament, ‘and all this is to make our King absolute by bringing in Popery and arbitrary Government.’¹¹¹ In mid-November 1679 the Earl of Huntingdon wrote home from London of ‘terrible newes of a league with France for five yeares, In which time’, he feared, ‘Wee shall see foreiners our Masters’.¹¹² At the end of December 1679 an anonymous letter addressed to the mayor of Bristol alleged ‘that our popish And treacherous King hath sould the Kingdomes of England, Scotland, and Ireland, together with all his dominions To the King of France’, and that ‘we are all bought as slaves, and designed as innocent sheep for the slaughter, to be butchered and sacrificed to the fury of the papists.’ (The author claimed he had learned the news whilst serving as a page in the household of the Duke of Orléans, Louis XIV's brother.) ¹¹³

MPs and pamphleteers tended not to attack Charles directly, but rather to blame the neglect of English foreign-policy interests on the King's ministers. Parliament set about trying to remove those ministers who were believed to have given the crown bad advice, hence the parliamentary attack on Danby in the winter and spring of 1678–9 (to be discussed below). They were nevertheless deeply concerned about Charles's stance on France. As William Sacheverell put it in the Commons on 14 April 1679, it seemed ‘strange’ that England had for some years made it her business ‘to greaten France’.¹¹⁴ XIV began to threaten the Low Countries, Charles saw no apparent need to try to check the expansionist ambitions of the French king, despite the alarming implications for both Britain and the Protestant interest in northern Europe, as well as for the balance of power in Europe as a whole. In early 1681 Francis Smith published a copy of the Spanish ambassador's plea to Charles of the previous December to do something to ‘restrain the Torrent of France’ before the French overran the Low Countries. The Low Countries were ‘the Master-key of the Universal Monarchy, and the first door’ which Louis would ‘open with it’, the ambassador warned, would ‘be that of England’.¹¹⁵

Whigs tended to see the cause of Exclusion and the international situation as inextricably linked. In the Commons debate on the Exclusion Bill on 11 May 1679, Hugh Boscawen warned fellow members that, if they did not seize this ‘opportunity to secure the Protestant Religion’, posterity would curse them in their graves: ‘The whole Protestant Religion in Europe’, he insisted, ‘is struck at, in a Popish Succession in England. If the Protestant Religion keeps not up its head now, under a Protestant King, it must be drowned under a Popish.’¹¹⁶ One Exclusionist tract, produced at the time of the elections to the Oxford Parliament, advised voters that ‘Upon the Choice of this Parliament’ depended ‘the happiness or misery not only of his Majesties Dominions, but of the whole Protestant Religion, and of all the Reformed Churches in Christendom’: a ‘good Parliament’ might be the means of saving Flanders, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire ‘from being reduced to the French Yoke; after which, the ruine of this Kingdom would be an unavoidable consequence’.¹¹⁷ In mid-February 1681 Curtis's True Protestant Mercury printed letters from Holland and the distressed Protestants in Germany and France stating that they hoped Charles II would adhere to his parliament, ‘for that the Protestant Interest in all Europe lies at stake, and the Welfare thereof depends upon the Conduct of Affairs in England’.¹¹⁸

The Scottish and Irish Dimensions

As these last examples make clear, people were worried not just about what the Catholic heir might do, or what Catholics at home and abroad might be up to; they were also concerned about what Charles II himself was up to. It is in this context that the multiple-kingdom dimension becomes important. We cannot understand the full intensity of people's concerns about popery and arbitrary government unless we recognize that their fears were shaped, in large part, by what had actually been going on, under the restored monarchy, in Scotland and Ireland.

When Shaftesbury warned his fellow peers in March 1679 that ‘Popery and slavery’ went ‘hand in hand’, he was thinking not in narrowly English terms but explicitly about the three Stuart kingdoms as a whole. ‘In England’, he said, ‘popery was to have brought in slavery,’ whereas ‘in Scotland slavery went before, and popery was to follow.’ The Scots were under ‘the same prince, and the influence of the same favourites and councils’, and when ‘they are hardly dealt with’, Shaftesbury asked, could ‘we that are richer expect better usage?’ Shaftesbury then attacked a number of initiatives that had happened in Scotland under Lauderdale – such as the increasing centralization of the government, the violation of basic legal rights, and the deployment of the Highland Host in the Presbyterian south-west – and alleged that ‘Scotland hath outdone all the eastern and southern countries in having their lives, liberties and estates subjected to the arbitrary will and pleasure of those that govern.’ ‘Till the pressure be fully taken off from Scotland’, he concluded, ‘it is not possible… to believe that good is meant to us here,’ especially when one considered that under the terms of the Scottish Militia Act the Scottish government had the power to raise 22,000 men ‘to be ready to invade us upon all occasions’. Shaftesbury also expressed concern about the security of the Protestant establishment in Ireland, where ‘the Papists [had had] their arms restored’ and both the inland and coastal towns were ‘full of Papists’; he predicted that the kingdom would not ‘long continue in English hands, if some better care be not taken of it’.¹¹⁹ Similarly, in the Commons debate on Exclusion of 26 October 1680, Sir Henry Capel (brother to the Earl of Essex, who had recently served as Lord Lieutenant in Ireland), after first rehearsing the threat of popery in England since the Restoration, went on to express his concerns about ‘how things have been carried on in Scotland and Ireland’. Thus in Ireland the papists, who outnumbered the Protestants by at least five to one, ‘and may probably derive from their cradle an inclination to massacre them again’, were allowed to wear arms contrary to law and were living in corporations, and in Scotland the government was ‘quite altered, the use of parliaments in a manner abolished’, power lodged ‘in a commissioner and council’ and ‘a standing army of 22,000 men settled’ – all of which was done, Capel thought, ‘to divide the Protestant Interest, and to encourage the Papists’.¹²⁰

The English parliament could do little directly to influence policy in Scotland, since Scotland was an independent kingdom. It could, however, legitimately strike at the Duke of Lauderdale, who was also an earl in the English peerage and a member of the English privy council. On 6 May 1679 Sir Richard Graham moved that the Commons should address the King ‘to remove the Duke of Lauderdale from his Presence and Councils’. Lauderdale, Graham charged, had been instrumental in breaking up the temporary alliance formed between the Protestant powers of England, Sweden and the Netherlands in 1678, and it was he who had advised issuing the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, which gave religious freedom to Catholics, so that he could ‘bring in Popery like a stream, and Tyranny like a torrent’. He had also ‘brought in arbitrary Power’ north of the Tweed. Colonel John Birch agreed that ‘If there be any arbitrary power in the World, it is in Scotland,’ adding that he feared ‘this Duke may go through with it here.’ Sir felt that ‘Arbitrary power’ was ‘the more ready to be exercised here, for being begun in Scotland’; after all, Lauderdale had boasted that he had ‘made the King absolute in Scotland’. He had brought ‘his fellow-subjects into servitude and slavery’, and his principles were inconsistent ‘with the Protestant cause’; it was ‘dangerous for him to be near the King’. Sacheverell pointed out that Lauderdale had used Scotland as a testing ground, beginning those ‘arbitrary things in Scotland, which he afterwards did attempt in England’, such as the Declaration of Indulgence.¹²¹

Although Graham's motion was carried, the dissolution at the end of the month saved Lauderdale from the English parliament. The Bothwell Bridge rebellion of May–June 1679, however, effectively spelled the end of Lauderdale's political career. In June 1679 Charles allowed a delegation of Scottish nobility, headed by Hamilton, Atholl, and Sir John Cochrane, to come to court to present a written testimony against Lauderdale. They started by castigating Lauderdale's policies towards the Presbyterians of the Scottish south-west, which had triggered the Bothwell Bridge uprising, accusing the Duke of deliberately misrepresenting this area as being in a state of rebellion so that he could raise an army against the King's peaceable subjects. This army had in turn taken free quarter in a time of peace, which was against the whole constitution; subjects had been forced to subscribe an exorbitant bond; the nobility and gentry of Ayrshire had been falsely indicted for treason; others had been declared incapable of public trust; subjects had been kept prisoner contrary to law; while the Scottish privy council had imposed unreasonable and arbitrary fines and seized gentlemen's dwellings and put garrisons in them, again contrary to law. They further alleged that Lauderdale had been engaged in a long-term ‘Designe of Bringing in Popery and Arbitrary Government’. Thus in 1669, already aware that York had converted to Catholicism, Lauderdale had induced the Scottish parliament to pass an act asserting the king's supremacy in religious affairs, thus giving the king absolute power over the disposal of the external government of the Church. He had ‘expressly Excepted’ Catholics from the act of 1670 against withdrawers from public worship, which was aimed only at members of the reformed religion, and proceeded to give Catholics public employment in the service of the crown. He had also received a pension from the French king, kept up a correspondence with papists and Catholic priests, and done his best to suppress information reaching Scotland about the Popish Plot. Lauderdale's lust for arbitrary power, they claimed, was just as self-evident: note the legislation establishing a military force of 22,000 men that could be brought into England on any cause, and the fact that he had forced all officers of state to hold their commissions at royal pleasure. He had put members in and out of the Scottish council to suit his own designs, packed all judicatures so that ‘Justice and Equity’ were ‘Administered according to his pleasure’, and opposed the union of Scotland and England because he thought it would cost him ‘that absolute Power he had in Scotland’. Such was his contempt of the House of Commons that he had been heard to say that ‘if they would Address against him, he would fart against them, and… put a dog in his Arse and bark at them,’ boasting that every time they had complained against him he had only risen higher. Magna Carta he called ‘magna farta’.¹²²

Charles by this time had clearly decided to let Lauderdale fall, albeit gently. His replacement, however, was hardly more comforting to the Whigs. Although in the immediate aftermath of Bothwell Bridge Monmouth, the man responsible for putting down the rebellion, emerged as the dominant voice in Scottish affairs, from the autumn of 1679 that role passed to the King's Catholic brother and heir. In March 1679 Charles had sent York into temporary exile in Brussels, to get him out of the way while the crisis over the succession unfolded in England. In October he decided to let him take up residence in Edinburgh. York went there via London, for a quick visit on the way. Essentially it was a continuation of his exile, yet during two stints in Scotland (the first from November 1679 to the end of February 1680; the second from October 1680 to March 1682) he took over the helm of government north of the border. The Duke's success in building up a loyalist interest there will be considered in Chapter 6. In England, however, York's presence at the head of the government in Scotland proved a cause of some concern. One man allegedly said in the autumn of 1680 that he thought ‘it would not be long before the Duke came with an army out of Scotland to cut all the throats of the true Protestants and fire their houses and beat their children's brains out before their faces, which plot he was sure was now a-hatching in Scotland.’¹²³ That November Shaftesbury voiced his concern in the Lords that the Duke was now ‘in Scotland raising of Forces upon the Terra firma, that can enter dry foot upon us, without hazard of Winds or Seas… to be ready when from hence he shall have notice’.¹²⁴ In a tract published in the spring of 1681, Jones and Sidney complained that Scotland had already been ‘delivered into the hands of a Prince’ who was ‘the known head of the Papists in these Kingdomes, and the Occasion of all their Plots and Insolencies’.¹²⁵ York's style of government in Scotland, where he presided over an increasing clampdown on Presbyterian dissent and over legislative initiatives by the Scottish parliament in 1681 designed to enhance the authority and autonomy of the monarchy in Scotland, seemed to offer an ominous foretaste of what could be expected in England once he inherited the throne. As one manuscript satire of c. 1681 warned, ‘In Scotland we a well-drawn Model see / Of what he proposes we [in England] once shall be.’¹²⁶

English Protestants were also concerned about the state of affairs in Ireland. Following Shaftesbury's speech of March 1679, the Lords decided to initiate an immediate inquiry into what security measures had been taken in Ireland ‘in this Time of Imminent Danger’.¹²⁷ They learned that the Lord Lieutenant, Ormonde, had ordered the arrest of the titular archbishop of Dublin, Peter Talbot, and his brother Richard, for alleged conspiracy in the Popish Plot (the former was to die in prison, the latter was allowed to go abroad for his health); had instructed the Catholic bishops and other dignitaries, together with the Jesuits and regular clergy, to leave the kingdom; and had forbidden Catholics from carrying firearms and from residing in any garrison towns – although apparently with limited success, since Ormonde was soon issuing further proclamations ordering those Catholic clergy who had not left the kingdom to be imprisoned, and castigating local magistrates for being remiss in searching for and seizing arms. The Irish privy council had rejected a proposal to remove Irish Catholics from the corporations, however, since the English needed them as ‘Servants, Tenants, and Tradesmen’, though Ormonde did revive the commission of array and raise the militia in all parts of the kingdom, doing what he could to supply the deficiency in arms and reinforcing the army with some 1,200 men from England.¹²⁸ Yet, despite being advised that ‘all Things’ in Ireland were ‘in full Peace and Quietness’, the Lords asked for a stricter enforcement of the laws against Catholics, and even suggested that legislation be prepared to prevent Catholics from being lawyers, clerks of the peace or under-sheriffs, and from serving on juries, and requiring members of both houses of the Irish parliament and the inhabitants of all ports and forts in Ireland to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and any other tests designed to distinguish Protestants from papists. However, the English parliament was to be dissolved before further action on this front could be taken.¹²⁹

Rumours about what allegedly was going on in Ireland served to heighten public anxiety in England about the threat of popery. For example, in October 1679 one London-based newsletter writer spoke of ‘a Report about Towne of a discovery of a designed Massacre in Ireland’ and the seizure of some ‘6000 Armes’.¹³⁰ Then in the spring of 1680 Shaftesbury revealed to the English privy council that he had learned that the Catholics in Ireland, with French assistance, were planning to rise in revolt and massacre Protestants.¹³¹ There seems to have been no truth to this supposed Irish Plot – not that Shaftesbury fabricated it himself, though he showed little desire to question the credibility of the witnesses as he sought to exploit the plot for political advantage – but before it was discredited it was to claim the life of the unfortunate Oliver Plunket, titular archbishop of Armagh, executed in 1681 for alleged conspiracy with the French against the English government.¹³² The Irish Plot and the Plunket affair served to highlight two deep-seated anxieties that many English people shared at this time: that Ireland might be used as a launching pad for an invasion of England by France, and that Ormonde was not doing enough to secure the Protestant interest. There had been recurrent reports in the 1660s and '70s that the Catholic powers of Europe, and especially the French, were preparing to make an attempt on Britain through the back door of Ireland,¹³³ and fears of a foreign Catholic invasion of Ireland persisted throughout the Exclusion Crisis.¹³⁴ Ormonde, who came from a Catholic family, was accused of shielding Catholics from the rigours of the penal laws, even allowing them to hold office under the crown, despite the anti-Catholic initiatives of the winter and spring of 1678–9.¹³⁵ He came under attack in the Commons debate on Exclusion on 26 October 1680, notably from Sir Henry Capel (whose remarks have been noted above).¹³⁶ In early January 1681 the Lords declared that they were ‘fully satisfied’ that ‘for divers Years… there hath been a horrid and treasonable Plot and Conspiracy, contrived and carried on by those of the Popish Religion in Ireland, for massacring the English, and subverting the Protestant Religion, and the ancient established Government of that Kingdom.’ In the Commons, Capel concurred, saying that, although some people ‘smiled at’ the Popish Plot in England, ‘it is plain there was a Plot in Ireland’, and ‘the hopes of a Popish Successor’ were ‘the Grounds of all this’.¹³⁷

Although the attack on Ormonde was to fail, the Whig media continued to fuel fears about the Irish situation. In early 1681 Curtis's True Protestant Mercury carried a number of reports of how the Protestants in Ireland lived in daily fear of an imminent French invasion.¹³⁸ When the second Exclusion Parliament was prorogued in January 1681, Curtis reported how the Papists in Dublin were so ‘elevated at the News… that they Hector about the streets with Swords and other Arms’, leading the Protestants to fear ‘they will execute some desperate Design upon them.’¹³⁹ An electioneering pamphlet for the Oxford Parliament predicted that ‘A good Parliament’ might ‘retrieve the distressed Protestants in Ireland, from that second Popish Massacre which so daily threatens them’.¹⁴⁰ Likewise in 1681 a tract by Sir William Petty (though published anonymously) rehearsed the likelihood that the French might try to invade Ireland as a way of striking at England and, recalling that the Catholics in Ireland greatly outnumbered the Protestants, asked whether it was likely that the Irish would ‘sooner joyn with the English, against whom they have a blind Antipathy… than with the French Romanists, whom they would welcome as Saviours and Restorers of their All’? Candidly reminding his readers that the Catholics of Ireland ‘think they lost all by the English’, he predicted that ‘they'd venture all they have, viz. their Lives, for the French or other Foreigner.’¹⁴¹

Charles II's Style of Government in England

Public anxiety about the threat of popery and arbitrary government, then, was structured in significant ways by what was represented as the reality of the situation in Ireland and Scotland. The threat was already a real one, in the present, and could be seen in the two other kingdoms over which Charles II ruled. Swift action would need to be taken if England were to avoid falling victim. The problem was, however, that for many England already seemed to have become a victim. As we saw in Chapter 1, concerns about popery and arbitrary government in England had begun to be raised during the mid-1670s, during the time of Danby's ascendancy. They were to come to a head in the aftermath of the Popish Plot.

One cause for alarm was the army that Charles had begun to build up in the winter of 1677–8, supposedly for war with France. Once it became apparent that Charles was not going to go to war, the continuance of these forces seemed both unnecessary and potentially dangerous. Parliament had already voted money for the disbanding of the troops in June 1678, yet by the autumn some 25,000 troops were still in arms, and some members came to fear that Charles would use the excuse of the Popish Plot to keep the army in being. Parliament pushed ahead with a Militia Bill in an attempt to secure the disbanding of the troops, but Charles rejected this in November, on the grounds that it encroached upon his prerogative by temporarily removing the militia from his control.¹⁴² In addition to the question of why the army was still in being, there were also concerns about the burdens being borne by those communities where the troops were stationed. The Petition of Right of 1628 had declared that it was illegal to compel inhabitants to receive soldiers and mariners into their houses against their will. This meant that troops could be billeted only in public houses, and had to pay for their board and lodging. Yet Charles II's army did not always pay its way; in March 1679, for instance, the Reading victuallers complained that if they were not reimbursed soon they would be unable to ‘subsist any longer’.¹⁴³

The campaign against the army was resumed in the first Exclusion Parliament. In a Commons debate on 29 March 1679, Sir Nicholas Carew demanded to know ‘whether the Army has been upon free quarter, against the Petition of Right’. James Vernon (the Duke of Monmouth's secretary) insisted that it had not, but suggested that people had sometimes relieved soldiers out of compassion when they saw they had nothing to live on. As far as Sir Henry Capel was concerned, however, ‘By the Petition of Right, they ought to be quartered in no man's house.’¹⁴⁴ When the debate resumed on 1 April, William Garraway declared ‘that this Army’ was ‘kept up to the oppression of the people’ and ‘contrary to the Laws of the Nation’; Colonel Birch insisted that ‘this Army was disbanded by Act’ and should not be kept up; Sir Thomas Lee claimed that ‘the Petition of Right [was] invaded’; while Sir William Coventry thought there was no doubt that ‘the Law has been broken by keeping them up.’ The Commons concluded by passing a resolution ‘That the continuing of any standing Forces in this Nation, other than the Militia, is illegal, and a great grievance and vexation to the people.’¹⁴⁵ In May parliament passed another Disbanding Act, calling for the disbanding of the troops still in existence and confirming that it was illegal to force private householders to receive soldiers into their homes without their consent.¹⁴⁶

The standing army was a factor in the fall of Danby. In December 1678 the Commons had tried to impeach Danby for high treasons, crimes and misdemeanours, charging him (among other things) with having attempted to subvert the ancient form of government by introducing an arbitrary and tyrannical form of government; raising a standing army and continuing it in being contrary to the statute disbanding it; encroaching upon the royal power by treating of war and peace with foreign princes without informing the Secretaries of State; negotiating a peace with France contrary to the King's interests; trying to hinder the meeting of parliament, taking a bribe from the French king, and paying unnecessary pensions; and being popishly affected and having endeavoured to suppress evidence relating to the Popish Plot.¹⁴⁷ The Lords refused to commit Danby, and Charles, to forestall the inevitable conflict between the two houses, decided first to prorogue and then to dissolve parliament. However, when a new parliament convened in March, the Commons immediately resumed the case against Danby. With a trial seeming inevitable, Charles dramatically announced on 22 March that he had granted the Earl a pardon under the Great Seal.¹⁴⁸ The Commons therefore decided to proceed against Danby by bill of attainder; the Lords tried to turn the bill into one for banishment; and Danby himself finally resolved the matter by surrendering to the Usher of the Black Rod on 15 April, whereupon he was committed to the Tower. When he stood before the bar of the Lords on 25 April to enter his plea against the articles of impeachment, he denied all charges and invoked his royal pardon. The Commons, however, insisted that the pardon was null and void and that the Lords should proceed to judgement, since invoking a pardon was tantamount to admitting guilt.¹⁴⁹

The dispute over the validity of Danby's pardon is worth examining in detail, since it raised fundamental questions over the extent to which the king could shield individuals from prosecution under the law. Most accepted that the power to pardon was ‘an essential prerogative’ belonging to the king, ‘Connate with his Kingshipp’, the logic being that the prosecution of all crimes was in the king's name and therefore releasable by the warrant of his attorney-general. The chief limitation was that the king could not free a convicted individual from any claims that an injured third party might have on his estate; a royal pardon could not interfere with someone else's property rights. Yet medieval precedent (notably the cases of William Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons in 1376) seemed to confirm that the king did have the power to pardon parliamentary impeachments.¹⁵⁰

The Commons, however, challenged the legality of Danby's pardon. If nothing else, procedural irregularities (the pardon had not gone through all the appropriate offices) were enough to make it void.¹⁵¹ Yet, more fundamentally, there was the issue of whether ‘this Pardon can be just’, as Edward Vaughan, MP for Cardiganshire, asked.¹⁵² Serjeant Sir William Ellis argued in the Commons on 24 March that, although the king, as ‘the fountain of Justice and Mercy’, was allowed to ‘pardon offenders’, there were some things he could not pardon, even when the indictment was in the king's name, such as offences against the public good. This impeachment was ‘at the suit of all the Commons of England’, he continued, and neither the King nor the attorney-general was a party to it; it was ‘in the nature of an Appeal of Rape, which the king cannot pardon’.¹⁵³ It was true that the crown had pardoned impeachments in the past, but never before judgement had been given in parliament. Besides, in the cases of Latimer and Lyons Richard II had pardoned only what belonged to him. Latimer, for instance, had confessed to having collected impositions in Brittany without telling the King, delivering up the fort of St Saviour, and releasing prisoners without the King's order; if the King decided to forgive Latimer the money that he was owed, that was up to him.¹⁵⁴ However, as the veteran lawyer Sir Harbottle Grimston pointed out, the charge against Danby was ‘an universal Grievance’, which it was not in the king's power to pardon.¹⁵⁵ Charles I had himself acknowledged, in his Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of 1642, Richard Hampden recalled, that a prince might not use his power of pardoning ‘to the hurt of those for whose good he hath it’, or ‘make use of the name of public necessity, for the gain of his private favourites and followers, to the detriment of the people’.¹⁵⁶ Sir Francis Winnington, who had already questioned the legality of the pardon during the debate on 22 March, spelled out his argument more fully in a speech delivered on 5 May. ‘In Appeals, etc. where the King has an interest and share in the Suit, there the King may bar an Indictment’, or pardon his share of the forfeiture. Yet it was very different ‘where the King has no share’ and the prosecution is brought ‘only by the Commons of England’. In such cases ‘it is you that have the interest in the Suit, and all the Commons of England,’ and ‘if what is grievous to the people be pardoned, it is to no end that the Parliament should meet,’ other ‘than to give Money when it is asked’. In a dramatic climax, Winnington went on to suggest that ‘if such a Pardon be allowed, the Government of England will be destroyed, and the Commons of England cannot be relieved from the exorbitances of great men.’¹⁵⁷ A Commons committee, set up to investigate the whole affair, concluded on 26 May that ‘the setting up a Pardon to be a Bar of an Impeachment’ defeated ‘the whole Use and Effect of Impeachments’, and if admitted would destroy ‘the chief Institution for the Preservation of the Government’, and ‘consequently the Government itself’.¹⁵⁸

The case against Danby was also carried out-of-doors. An account claiming to be a copy of Winnington's speech of 22 March, but which differs significantly from that transcribed by the parliamentary diarist, circulated in manuscript. In it, Winnington insists that the king cannot ‘pardon treason against the government’, otherwise the government will not ‘be safe against evil ministers’. The prerogative is supposed to be used ‘to abate rigorous Justice, not to destroy it’; if ministers can ‘be pardoned at the prince's pleasure for all the wrongs they do the people’, Winnington concludes, ‘there is no security, and our pretended free and legall government is a meer cheat, and we arrant slaves.’¹⁵⁹ One pamphleteer, after an unconvincing attempt to exonerate the King from blame on the grounds that he could not have been properly acquainted with the true nature of Danby's crimes, stated that he was certain that the consequences of the pardon were ‘evil, since if a Pardon stands good against such an Impeachment in parliament’, a subject (notwithstanding Magna Carta) would have no redress ‘against any Courtier, who when he hath ravish'd his Wife or murdered his Children, produces such a Pardon from his Master’. The argument was a reductio ad absurdum, but the point was clear enough: ‘Is not the King in this case as absolute as the great Turk?’¹⁶⁰

The Commons did not win their point of principle. Opinion in the Lords was divided over Danby, but he had a strong following in the upper house, not least among the bishops, whose votes seemed likely to tip the balance in his favour. Shaftesbury and other opposition peers, fearing defeat, tried to argue that bishops should not be allowed to exercise a judicial function in the Lords in capital cases, since under canon law they were prohibited from shedding blood and it was inevitable they would not convict – a position which came to be endorsed by the Commons. With the dispute still unresolved, Charles decided at the end of May to prorogue parliament; in July, he changed the prorogation into a dissolution. Nevertheless, Danby was left to stew in the Tower for another five years. He was eventually bailed in February 1684, on a personal recognizance of £,000 and a further four sureties of £5,000 – a staggering £30,000 in total.¹⁶¹

The conflict over the impeachment of Danby, coming as it did early in the Exclusion Crisis, did not break down along Whig/Tory lines. Rather, it was driven by faction: the Earl had made many enemies both at court and in parliament, and there were many who were keen to see him fall who would later side with the Tories over the issue of the succession.¹⁶² Yet Danby's policy towards the Church, and the particular brand of intolerant high Anglicanism he chose to promote, had also aroused the opposition of Shaftesbury and many country MPs who were later to become Whigs. Indeed, the Whigs were concerned not just about developments in the state under Charles II; they were also concerned about developments in the Church. Most Whigs sympathized with the plight of the Protestant nonconformists: many came from a Puritan or low-church background (as did Shaftesbury himself, who during the Restoration had emerged as a bitter critic of the pretensions of the high-church bishops), while not a few were only occasional conformists or even dissenters themselves. They were deeply alarmed that Protestants could still be persecuted for their religious beliefs when the very security of Protestantism in England seemed in danger. Unity in the face of the Catholic threat, and hence some form of religious toleration for Protestant nonconformists, therefore became a central plank of the Whig platform. One pamphleteer claimed that ‘woful Experience’ had shown the laws against Protestant dissenters to be ‘not only useless, but inconvenient, both to the Protestant Religion, and the Safety of the Kingdom’.¹⁶³ Whigs thus supported measures for comprehension and toleration, and also sought the repeal of the act of 1593 against seditious sectaries (the infamous 35 Elizabeth), which allowed Protestants who did not come to church to be prosecuted as recusants and which carried with it the punishments of exile, forfeiture of goods, and potentially even death if those convicted refused to conform.¹⁶⁴

Pleas for unity could not conceal that Whig grievances with the existing establishment in the Church ran deep. The Whigs were fiercely critical of the high-church clergy, and especially the bishops, whom they saw as champions of divine right, absolute monarchy and the indefeasibility of the hereditary succession. They thus condemned the Tory clergy (or Tantivees, as the Whigs called them) as church-papists, because they opposed Exclusion and the rights of parliament and backed the persecution of Protestant dissenters. The London merchant William Lawrence confided to his diary in the spring of 1679 that the clergy had already begun ‘to adore the rising Sun, and to entertaine very kind thoughts of a popish Successor’, adding that he thought that, ‘if the Church of England’ should be ‘so blind and mad as to oppose’ Exclusion, she deserved ‘to forfeit all her Goods as a Felo de se and as guilty of her owne Murder’.¹⁶⁵ One print from 1680 shows the pope holding out a cardinal's hat to a group of Anglican clerics, while an engraving from 1681 shows a Tory and a Tantivee galloping off towards the pope, who offers them protection.¹⁶⁶ The bishops were in truth ‘Protestants in Masquerade’, Whig polemicists claimed, and the clergy were debauched ‘knaves’ whose doctrines threatened to make us ‘slaves’.¹⁶⁷ Benjamin Harris pondered whether the maxim ‘No Bishop, No Pope; no Prelacy, no Popery, Be not more Infallible than that, no Bishop no King’.¹⁶⁸ A tract that circulated in 1679 (though which was a reprint of a 1667 work) blamed a whole series of civil grievances on the ecclesiastical hierarchy in England, including ‘Impoverishing the Nation’ and the ‘Ruin of Trade’ (which the author attributed to ‘the Pomp, Pride, Luxury, Exaction and Oppressions of the Prelates’); it then asked why, when other reformed Churches had abolished the office of bishop as popish, England had kept it, pointing out that other reformed countries took the lordly revenues from the prelates and reserved them ‘for publick use’.¹⁶⁹ Following the defeat of the second Exclusion Bill in the Lords in mid-November 1680, a ballad called ‘The Magpye, Or the Song against the Bishops' appeared, accusing ‘our Prelatick Pies’ of preying ‘on church and state… In the open face of day’. ‘They say Protestants they are,’ it ran, ‘Yet they wish a Popish Heire / And 'tis plaine they lye at lurch / To give up State and church. Complaining how the bishops, ‘without knowledge in our laws’, taught ‘bedience implicit’ to the king, and used scripture “Gainst Magna Carta’, the rhymester concluded that for ‘Jus divinum… wee care not a turd’ and emplored:

Send the magpies then to Rome

From where they all did come

There they do the Popes work

And like Romens crye Yorke, Yorke.¹⁷⁰

Because the bishops were associated with a championship of the crown, and vice versa, occasionally the condemnation of the former was linked with criticism of the latter. Thus one mock litany of 1681 prayed for deliverance ‘From the Lawless Dominion of the Miter and Crowne / Whose Tyranny is so absolute growne’.¹⁷¹

Nor was this just propaganda; there is plenty of evidence of antiepiscopalian or anti-clerical sentiment among supporters of the Whigs at the grass-roots level. At the Exeter election of March 1679 the ‘loyal party’, spearheaded by the staunch churchman Sir Thomas Carew, was opposed by William Glyde, the former nonconformist mayor, and by the dissenting interest, whose supporters allegedly ran up and down the streets threatening their opponents and chanting ‘Down with the Church.’¹⁷² At Essex in August 1679 those who supported the Whig candidates came to the polls crying ‘No popish Clergy’ and ‘No bishops,’ in addition to ‘No Courtier, no Pensioner.’ Cries of ‘No clergy, no bishops’ greeted the return of the Whig candidates at the Oxford election of 1681.¹⁷³ In September 1680, when he was entertained at Oxford by Robert Pauling, Oxford's Presbyterian mayor, and several aldermen, Monmouth was welcomed with cries of ‘God bless the Protestant Duke’ and ‘No York, no bishops, no versity¹⁷⁴ At about Christmas that year one Francis Cary, a gentleman from Ilminster, Somerset, when out drinking with a group of friends, was overheard giving a toast to the Confusion of all the Clergy of England’, whom he thought were ‘Rogues’, and especially his local Bishop of Bath and Wells and his adherents.¹⁷⁵, son of Sir Edward and Whig MP for Kent during the Exclusion Crisis, was accused by his enemies of having drunk ‘a healthe to the confusion of lawn sleeves’ when campaigning at the polls – a charge which he later denied as he sought to reingratiate himself with the crown following the defeat of the parliamentary Exclusion movement, though he did admit that ‘all the fanaticks’ of the county backed him and that he thought there was ‘more present danger to church and state from the papists then from dissenting protestants’.¹⁷⁶

The way Charles chose to frustrate the Whigs’ demands – through recourse to his prerogative power to prorogue and dissolve parliament – raised concerns about the security of parliamentary government in England. On 17 December 1680 the Commons resolved that a bill should be brought in to secure the meeting and sitting of frequent parliaments.¹⁷⁷ Ironically, it was an initiative that was lost because of the prorogation and subsequent dissolution of this parliament. When Charles announced the dissolution of the second Exclusion Parliament, in January 1681, the Commons responded with a resolution that whoever had advised the King to do this was a ‘Betrayer of the king, the Protestant Religion, and the kingdom of England; a Promoter of the French Interest, and a Pensioner to France’ – unless his motive had been to secure the meeting of another parliament which could then pass an act excluding the Duke of York.¹⁷⁸ The dissolution also saw the demise of a bill for repealing the Act of 3 5 Elizabeth; the bill had passed the two houses, but the clerk of the Lords failed to tender it to the King for the royal assent.¹⁷⁹

Whigs responded to what they saw as a threat to parliamentary government by repeating claims first made by the country opposition in the mid-1670s: that legislation dating back to Edward III's reign required that there be annual sessions of parliament. This did not help, of course, if there were regular meetings of parliament but the King kept proroguing or dissolving them to frustrate their initiatives, and so the Whigs now began to insist that parliaments should be allowed to continue to sit until they had completed their business. In November 1680, during the long prorogation of the second Exclusion Parliament, the common council of London petitioned the King asking not only that he allow the parliament to sit but also that he continue its sitting until it had finished the matters before it. Charles's response was to tell the common council not to meddle with things that did not appertain to it.¹⁸⁰ Writing shortly after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, Jones and Sidney, while accepting that English kings had generally ‘been Intrusted with the Power of calling and declaring the Dissolutions of Parliaments’, nevertheless insisted that ‘our Ancestors [had] provided, by divers Statutes, both for the holding Parliaments Annually, and that they should not be Prorogued or Dissolved till all Petitions and Bills before them were answered and Redressed.’¹⁸¹ Similarly, the author of Vox Populi; Or, the People's Claim of 1681, after reviewing the relevant medieval legislation, concluded ‘that Parliaments ought Annually to meet, to support the Government, and to redress the Grievances which may happen in the interval of Parliaments’, so that ‘For Parliaments to meet Annually, and not suffered to sit to Answer the Ends’ for which they had been called, ‘but to be Prorogued or Dissolved before they have finished their Work, would be nothing but a deluding the Law, and a striking at the foundations of the Government it self, and rend'ring Parliaments altogether Useless’.¹⁸² Out-of-doors it was coming to be believed that Charles himself was the man who had betrayed the kingdom. For instance, in early February 1682 the mayor of Bristol received an anonymous letter from an unknown hand with instructions to ‘send the enclosed to his Majesty’; inside were the words ‘We, the people of England, finding our parliaments dissolved, demand of thee, Charles Stewart, Quo Warranto are thou King of England?’¹⁸³

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

The Whigs had extensive support for their position among the nation at large. Anti-court or pro-Exclusionist interests were dominant in the Commons in all three parliaments that sat between 1679 and 1681, by roughly a proportion of three to two. Dominance in the Commons meant superiority at the polls. In the three general elections between 1679 and 1681, the Whigs tended to do better in the more open constituencies with larger electorates, while Tory electoral success was as great as it was only because the government or government supporters were able to control a significant number of smaller borough constituencies. Although there were some exceptions to this pattern and the Tories did achieve success in a few open constituencies, the majority of the enfranchised classes were clearly behind the Whigs at this time. Indeed, the number of contested elections dropped steadily as the Exclusion Crisis progressed (there were 101 contests in the first general election of 1679, 77 in the second, and only 54 in that of 1681), as court supporters in several constituencies came to recognize they had no realistic chance of ousting the incumbent Whig members.¹⁸⁴

Other evidence points to the strength of support for the Whigs out-of-doors. During the long intermission between the calling and the eventual meeting of the second Exclusion Parliament (it was supposed to meet on 17 October 1679, but did not actually do so until 21 October 1680), the Whigs launched a petitioning campaign calling upon the King to let parliament sit.¹⁸⁵ The way was led by sixteen Whig peers, who delivered a petition to Charles to this effect on 7 December 1679, although this soon met with a metropolitan and provincial response. There was certainly orchestration from the centre. Printed sheets containing an agreed wording were sent down from London to the provinces, where local agents would then busy themselves collecting signatories – although some areas seem to have modified the wording or adopted their own in order to reflect local concerns. The Green Ribbon Club may well have served as the organizational nerve-cell; Somerset certainly received the copy of its petition from club member Hugh Speke. The petitioning movement achieved greatest success in London; in January 1680 the City presented a monster petition signed by well over 16,000 people.¹⁸⁶ It is true that the provincial response was less encouraging than the Whigs might have hoped – the fact that on 12 December 1679 Charles issued a proclamation condemning the petitions undoubtedly served as a deterrent¹⁸⁷ – and in the end only five counties and one city presented petitions (Berkshire, Essex, Hertfordshire Somerset, Wiltshire and York).¹⁸⁸ In many areas there was also a certain amount of opposition to the Whig agenda, and some local grand juries drew up abhorrences of the petitions (discussed in Chapter 5). Nevertheless, the petitioning campaign seemed to point to the ability of the Whig central leadership to mobilize the masses, and the numbers of signatories that some of the Whig petitions could boast were alarming: 10,000 in Hertfordshire, 30,000 in Wiltshire, and allegedly over 40,000 in Essex.¹⁸⁹ The circumstances surrounding the collection of signatures were also a source of concern. For telling signatories that they had ‘but two ways of redress, by petition or rebellion’, the Taunton assizes slapped a £500 fine on the man who promoted the Somerset petition, a Taunton goldsmith named Thomas Dare, bound him over for good behaviour for three years, and sent him to prison until the fine was paid. (Dare protested that he was advocating petitioning and had explicitly denounced rebellion, but was tricked into confessing by the presiding judge, Sir Thomas Jones, on the promise of lenient treatment.) ¹⁹⁰

Further petitions calling for parliament to sit came in the summer – with London once more leading the way – and again following the prorogation and then dissolution of the second Exclusion Parliament in January 1681. Within less than twelve hours of the announcement of the dissolution on 18 January, for example, 6,000 people had allegedly put their names to a petition circulating in Warwickshire calling for the sitting of a new parliament.¹⁹¹ Several counties and towns throughout England sent addresses to their representatives, ‘returning them their hearty thanks for their unwearied endeavours in preserving the king's person and the protestant religion’.¹⁹² the city's four Whig MPs for their efforts in searching into the Popish Plot, working towards the exclusion of all popish successors (and particularly James, Duke of York), repealing the Act of 35 Elizabeth, and trying to promote the unity of Protestants; it promised to stand by them in their future endeavours to secure the realm from popery and arbitrary government, and suggested that no taxes should be voted until that end had been achieved.¹⁹³ During the general election of February and March, several provincial constituencies built on London's example and drew up instructions to their newly elected members informing them how they expected them to behave in the forthcoming parliament. The freeholders of Yorkshire thanked their two MPs for their services in the previous two parliaments, in which they had endeavoured ‘To preserve the Protestant religion, his Majestys person and the Kingdomes of England and Ireland from the many dangers which threaten'd them’, ‘Exclude a Popish Successor’ and ‘Unite all his Majestys Protestant Subjects’, and urged them to pursue the same agenda in the upcoming parliament in order ‘to secure us for the future against popery and arbitrary power’.¹⁹⁴ The Northamptonshire addressors told their newly elected MPs that they wanted to ‘be secured against a Popish successor’ and a means to be ‘found of uniting his Majesty's subjects against the common enemy’. By the latter, the addressors clearly had in mind some form of toleration for Protestant dissenters, although one paranoid commentator observed that by ‘common enemy’ could ‘be intended the King and the Church’, adding that, since the means were not specified, the MPs might seek to do this by a rebellion – ‘seizing the militia, usurping the King's prerogative, entering into a conspiracy, [and] levying men, money and arms’ as parliament had done back in 1642.¹⁹⁵

Then we have the evidence of the huge crowds that attended Whig rallies or demonstrations. The famous London pope-burning processions of 17 November attracted thousands of spectators: one estimate put the number as high as 200,000 in 1679.¹⁹⁶ There were provincial counterparts. On 5 November 1679 Lewes in East Sussex was the site of an elaborate pope-burning procession in which ‘several pictures’ depicting members of the Catholic clergy ‘were carried upon long poles’ and ‘an effigy of the Pope… [was] paraded around the town before being burnt at a bonfire’. At Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, that same day, the ‘Ancient Gallant Brittains’ held a similar display, in which individuals dressed as Catholic clerics processed through the town with banners bearing the words ‘Gunpowder Treason’, ‘Murder of Sir Edmundberry Godfrey’, ‘Cruelty’, ‘Assassination’, ‘Burning of London’, ‘Rebellion’, ‘Superstition’ and ‘Idolatry’; behind them came an effigy of the pope, seated on his chair of state, which was made to bow its head at the house of every local Catholic, much to the amusement of the numerous onlookers. Eventually the effigy was brought ‘to the fatal place of Execution’ and mounted on top of a huge pile of faggots provided by the local bakers to meet its fiery end.¹⁹⁷ At Salisbury on 5 November 1681 an effigy of the pope, ‘in his Chair of State, with a Triple Crown on his Head, a Cross in one hand, and a Scepter in the other’, was carried through the streets ‘with Thousands of People following it’, before eventually being burned at nightfall at ‘a great Bonfire’ in the market place. The list could be extended. Many provincial towns commemorated Gunpowder Treason Day with similar displays – not just notoriously Whig locales such as Taunton, in Somerset, but even (in 1681) places such as Chatham, the home of the royal shipyard (where the yard's carpenters prepared several carved images of the pope), and Oxford, Charles's preferred site for the meeting of parliament earlier that year because it was regarded as being one of his most loyal towns at the time.¹⁹⁸

There were copy-cat rituals north of the border. Towards the end of 1680 a group of scholars at Edinburgh University happened to be at a tavern ‘where there was hanging a Copper Plate, representing the Manner of burning the Pope at London’; this gave them the idea of staging a similar event in the Scottish capital. They fixed on Christmas Day for their pope-burning, since this was when the pope excommunicated Protestants, and entered into a combination to pursue their design, hiring a carver to construct a wooden effigy ‘with Cloathes, Tripple Crown, Keys, and other necessary habilments’. The Scottish council got wind of the plan on Christmas Eve, and ordered the regents of the university to put a stop to it; the students protested that they could not understand why they could not ‘do it here as well as it was done in London’. Although the authorities arrested several of the ringleaders in advance and stationed soldiers on guard the next day, the scholars went ahead with their procession, being joined by large numbers of apprentices and tradesmen, many of them wearing blue ribbons in their hats with the words ‘No Pope’, ‘No Priest’ and even ‘No Bishop’ and ‘No Atheist’ embroidered upon them. Giving the troops the slip by pronouncing that they were heading for the Grassmarket, the place where criminals were executed, they managed to proceed up the High Street before the soldiers eventually stopped their progress, whereupon the youths decided to blow up their effigy on the spot, with the help of some gunpowder, to the cries of ‘Noe Pope, Noe Pope in Scotland, and noe Papist.’ There were scuffles with troops, and several arrests were made. The authorities perhaps overreacted, though they were worried that the design was intended as a deliberate affront to the Duke of York, who was then present in the Scottish capital. They also suspected that English agitators had put the students up to it; indeed, two Englishmen were among those arrested as ringleaders. The fallout occurred on 11 January, when the official residence of the town provost was torched – the government thought in retaliation for his role in suppressing the demonstration, though the students were quick to deny any responsibility. The council responded by ordering the college temporarily to be shut and banishing the scholars 15 miles from the town, until their parents could find bonds for their good behaviour. If the original intention had been to nip things in the bud before they got out of hand, it had hardly worked. Indeed, according to the Whig press in London, the students of every other university in Scotland soon mimicked those of Edinburgh in carrying out their own mock execution of the pope. And all this from a students’ night out drinking in a local pub.¹⁹⁹

There were also a number of demonstrations in support of Monmouth. His return from exile in Holland towards the end of November 1679 prompted widespread bonfire celebrations throughout London, as hordes of well-wishers gathered to drink the Duke's health, and there was similar rejoicing in ‘several county towns’ throughout England.²⁰⁰ In February 1680 he made a brief progress to Chichester, where the local gentry, civic authorities and townsfolk afforded him a warm reception.²⁰¹ At the end of June, when he went to dine with some sixty-five Whig nobles and gentry at the Sun Tavern behind the Exchange in London, ‘a vast multitude of common people’ showed up to wish the Duke and the Earl of Shaftesbury well.²⁰² Similarly, ‘hundreds of Spectators crowded to see his Grace take Coach and loud acclamations sounded his welcome’ when he went to dine with a number of Whig peers and MPs at the Crown Tavern in Fleet Street in January 1681.²⁰³ Towards the end of July 1680 Monmouth set off on a tour of the West Country, which became a quasi-royal progress; wherever he went, the local gentry came out to greet him on horseback and accompany him to his host's residence, while a number of urban centres commemorated his visit with the inevitable bells, bonfires and toasts. At Crewkerne, in Somerset, Monmouth even touched for the King's Evil, thus making a powerful public statement about his belief in his own legitimacy. When he visited Oxford on his return to London in September 1680 crowds were out in force shouting, ‘A Monmouth, no York, no Bishop, no Clergy, no University.’²⁰⁴ In February 1681 Monmouth made another trip to Chichester, where he was greeted by over 400 gentry and the city's two MPs, and treated to dinner by the Whig peer Lord Grey of Warke, who lived near by; the local inhabitants celebrated with the inevitable bonfires.²⁰⁵ When he returned to London on Saturday 26 February he was greeted by ‘a great number of Gentlemen and Citizens’, and when he went to church at St Martin-in-the-Fields the next day, we are told, ‘the people expressed their joy to see him’ by ‘Crying out, God Bless the Protestant Duke’.²⁰⁶

At the same time, crowds were quick to show their resentment of the Whigs’ enemies. Lord Chief Justice Scroggs, who had achieved notoriety in July 1679 for questioning the evidence of Oates in the trial of Sir George Wakeman (the Queen's physician accused of poisoning the King) and thereby helping induce the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, met with ‘severall affronts’ when he went on his assize-court circuit the following month, with crowds chanting ‘A Wakeman, a Wakeman.’ In one place ‘they threw a dog half hanged into his coach.’²⁰⁷ Not even York himself was immune. When, in January 1679, he tried to help extinguish a fire that had broken out at the Temple, he was jeered by crowds calling him a ‘popish dog’, while he had a similar experience the following October when he attended the Artillery Company's feast.²⁰⁸

Nevertheless, it has been suggested that the situation never really became critical for the royal government, since ultimately the crown held all the trump cards.²⁰⁹ Charles repeatedly said that he was willing to agree to any measures that would guarantee the security of the Protestant religion under a popish successor, but that he would not agree to an Exclusion Bill. And, since the King alone determined when parliament could sit, he could always prorogue or dissolve parliament if it proved hostile (as he did to frustrate the efforts of the Exclusionists in all three parliaments between 1679 and 1681) or simply refuse to call it at all (as he did after 1681). Charles II was not in the same position as his father on the eve of the Civil War, when the King had become trapped by an act of 1641 prohibiting the dissolution of the Long Parliament without its own consent. Moreover, there was never any realistic chance of Exclusion passing the Lords, where the court interest enjoyed a clear majority; thus, when the second Exclusion Bill was brought before the Lords on 15 November 1680 it was defeated by a vote of 70 to 30.²¹⁰ The only way the Whigs could affect policy would be if they could win over the King; they appear to have hoped that in the face of concerted and demonstrable hostility to a popish successor in the nation at large Charles would back down and give them what they wanted. It was not an unreasonable belief, since Charles had been known to bow in the face of public pressure before, but on this occasion he chose to dig in his heels. Once this became apparent, people had the choice either to buckle under or to rebel, and very few had the stomach for another rebellion. Besides, the Whig crowds of the Exclusion Crisis on the surface appear to have been much less threatening than those on the eve of the Civil War. Thus, according to one modern scholar, the Whig demonstrations ‘smacked more of theatre than riot’, and, after they were over, the ‘participants and spectators reeled tipsily and innocuously off to bed.’²¹¹

Despite a seeming logic to this argument, it is ultimately unconvincing. We have to ask whether Charles, York or many of the leading royal advisers would have seen things this way. The answer is surely ‘no’. The crown was in deep trouble by 1679–80, and knew it only too well. The King might be able to frustrate the agenda of the Commons, but he could not pursue his own agenda. He found it difficult to establish an effective ministry. Following the revelations of the Popish Plot and the attack on Danby, Charles made a bold attempt to rebuild consensus by bringing key opposition spokesmen back within his administration. When Danby resigned his treasuryship on 26 March 1679, Charles put the treasury into commission, and made Essex its head. The following month he remodelled his privy council, reducing its size from 46 to 30 members and bringing in a number of critics of the court including Shaftesbury, whom he appointed Lord President.²¹² failed; the council came to be hopelessly racked by internal division, and the experiment was quickly abandoned. Without control over the Commons, Charles could not raise the revenue necessary to pursue an effective foreign policy; indeed, Whig MPs were adamant that no supply should be granted until the King had redressed their grievances.²¹³ Moreover, the French king, who had been providing subsidies to the crown on an intermittent basis in the 1670s, temporarily decided to withdraw his financial support and instead offer subsidies to the political opposition in England, believing that by keeping Charles embroiled in domestic intrigue at home he would be effectively neutralized on the international front. On the domestic front, the crown became so preoccupied with trying to deflect the attacks of the political opposition that it found itself unable to pursue any policy initiatives of its own.

Moreover, Charles was not particularly successful in protecting his political supporters. He pardoned Danby, but could not save him from the Tower. Likewise, he frustrated Exclusion, but had to send his brother into exile (first to the Low Countries, and later to Scotland). Those who were too vigorous in the pursuit of the crown's interests found themselves in a vulnerable situation – as did those who took a stance against the Whig petitioning campaign, for example. On October 1680 the Commons resolved that it was ‘the undoubted Right of the Subjects of England, to petition the King for the calling and sitting of Parliaments, and redressing of Grievances’, and that to represent such petitioning ‘as tumultuous and seditious’ was ‘to betray the Liberty of the Subject’.²¹⁴ They went on to demand the removal from office of Sir George Jeffreys, for ‘maliciously’ declaring petitioning to be ‘tumultuous, seditious and illegal’; to impeach North, for his role in issuing the royal proclamation of December 1679 against petitions; and to launch an inquiry into the abhorrers, expelling Sir Francis Withens from the House for promoting an abhorrence from the Westminster grand jury, and sending another abhorrer, Sir Robert Cann of Bristol, to the Tower for having said back in his constituency on the eve of the sitting of parliament that he thought ‘there was no Popish Plot, but a Presbyterian Plot.’²¹⁵ The Commons also set up a committee to investigate the Westminster judges, and voted to impeach Scroggs, Sir Thomas Jones and Richard Weston for various illegal acts committed in office, including discharging the Middlesex grand jury before the end of the term (in order to frustrate the attempt to indict York for recusancy); issuing an order prohibiting the future publication of Care's Weekly Pacquet (thereby usurping a legislative power); issuing illegal warrants against the authors, printers and publishers of seditious books, libels and pamphlets and for the seizure of such literature (illegal because the warrants did not name those who were to be arrested or the works that were to be seized); refusing bail to those whose offences were bailable (that is, to certain Whig printers and booksellers charged with publishing seditious libels); and imposing arbitrary and exorbitant fines (such as the £500 fines imposed on Benjamin Harris, for publishing his Appeal from the Country to the City, and on the Somerset petitioner Thomas Dare).²¹⁶ The Whigs pointed to the abuse of power by the judges as a further argument for why limitations on a popish successor could not work. As Capel put it in the Commons on 11 November 1680, ‘If Judges may do these things, neither the Laws we make, nor can make, will protect us.’²¹⁷ To ensure that judges would not be able to abuse their power in the future, the Commons resolved to introduce legislation to change the terms of judges’ commissions from ‘at royal pleasure’ to ‘at good behaviour’ and also to prevent the imposition of excessive fines.²¹⁸ In addition, the Commons impeached Edward Seymour, York's most outspoken champion in the lower house, for misappropriating funds as treasurer of the navy, and addressed the King for the removal from the privy council of the Earl of Halifax, the man who had led the opposition to Exclusion in the Lords in mid-November 1680, for having advised the dissolution of the first Exclusion Parliament.²¹⁹ It is true that the dissolutions of the second and third Exclusion Parliaments saved Seymour and the other men impeached, whereas Charles simply refused to sack Halifax. Yet the fact was that a climate of intimidation had been created, in which doing the King's business or supporting him in public was clearly seen to be dangerous. Jeffreys, indeed, did resign his recorder-ship of London out of fear.²²⁰ Scroggs proved too controversial a figure to keep on, and in April 1681 he was dismissed from the bench.

The crown's grip on local government also seemed precarious. Attempts at the Restoration to secure a Cavalier-Anglican monopoly of local office-holding had not been that effective, and, as the 1660s and '70s progressed, a number of those friendly to dissent – or even outright nonconformists – managed to get back into power in many areas. For many local magistrates, in both town and countryside, by the late 1670s the threat of popery and the political and religious leanings of the court seemed more worrisome than the problems posed by dissent, with the result that the penal laws against Protestant nonconformists were now seldom enforced. Moreover, county JPs and civic leaders could often exercise considerable influence in parliamentary elections; the disappointing performance by candidates sympathetic to the court in the two general elections of 1679 told its own story.

The court recognized that it needed to act, and therefore set about trying to reassert its control over country government. Although the lieutenancy was already in reasonably safe hands, before the return of the second Exclusion Parliament the crown did purge the deputy lieutenancy of a few of the more prominent Whigs and replace them with known anti-Exclusionists. More worrying was the state of the county bench, and in late 1679 the government began a systematic review of the lists of JPs. By April 1680 every county in England and Wales had received a new commission of the peace, while further adjustments were to follow in June and July. In all, some 272 JPs (out of a total of 2,559) were removed. The political agenda was transparent. Between about 45 and 50 of those MPs who had voted for Exclusion in May 1679 were left out, as were a number of JPs who had been active in promoting Whig petitions or particularly zealous in their pursuit of Catholics. However, the purge was far from complete. More than 60 Exclusionist MPs, for example, retained their commissions. In general, the government lacked the nerve to attempt a removal of Whigs of high social standing. Rather than removing all those who appeared disaffected, it seemed better to try to readjust the political balance on the county benches by adding new men of known loyalty. Even so, the remodelling was at best only a partial success. The court interest was to fare no better in the general election of February and March 1681.²²¹

It was the situation in the corporations that was most alarming. By the end of the second decade of Charles II's reign, opposition interests seemed firmly entrenched in power in a number of important cities and towns. London was the biggest worry. By the summer of 1680, the mayor was Whig, both the sheriffs (who were responsible for impanelling juries in London and Middlesex) were Whigs, and the Whigs had a majority on the common council, dominated many of the city companies, and enjoyed a numerical superiority among the liverymen (who elected the city's four MPs) and in common hall (the city electorate).²²² Norwich was described by the local bishop in 1673 as ‘the worst corporation’ he ‘had met with’, because nonconformists or nonconformist sympathizers had become so entrenched in office. ²²³ In Coventry – a notoriously fanatic town – some 37 per cent of those who held municipal office between 1660 and 1687 were dissenters or possible dissenters, and a staggering 48 per cent of the mayors.²²⁴ Between 1671 and 1682 Dorchester, in the West Country, had seven mayors who were either nonconformists or only occasional conformists. ²²⁵ In Oxford – not normally thought of as being a major centre of dissent – two formerly purged men served as mayor during the Exclusion Crisis: Robert Pauling (elected in 1679) and John Bowell (elected the following year). On the day of Pauling's election, the council made a pointed political gesture by admitting Titus Oates and his brother to the freedom of the city, while the following year they granted freedom to Monmouth and to the Whig peer Lord Lovelace, celebrating their admission with the toast ‘to the confusion of all Popish princes’.²²⁶ A riotous mayoral election in the borough of Saltash in Cornwall in the autumn of 1679, at which ‘great disturbances’ were committed ‘by a Rabble of unsworn Inhabitants of the said Burrough, having no Right of Election’, resulted in the choice of one Mr Skelton, a nonconformist who had formerly been ejected from the aldermanic bench for not taking the oaths prescribed by the Corporation Act.²²⁷

The government did make some attempt to clean up the corporations. In the spring of 1680 it launched an inquiry into the extent to which boroughs had enforced the provisions in the Corporation Act concerning taking the oaths and the Anglican sacrament and subscribing the declaration against the Covenant. Some could honestly claim that they had; too many had to acknowledge that they had not kept particularly good records. In a few towns high-Anglican zealots used the opportunity to drive their political opponents out of office. Many towns simply admitted their shortcomings and promised to do better in the future, taking little if any action. Besides, the Corporation Act provided no weapons against occasional conformists. Thus some corporations dismissed those guilty of non-compliance only to reinstall them promptly once they had nominally conformed, leaving the situation exactly as it had been before.²²⁸

The loss of control over corporate government made it difficult to use the law as a weapon against the enemies of Church and state. There were so many nonconformists in Berwick-upon-Tweed, it was reported in August 1679, that no one was willing to inform.²²⁹ William Glyde, who served as mayor of Exeter in 1676–7 before going on to represent the city in parliament, sought to build up electoral support among the dissenters by allowing ‘fifteen or sixteen Nonconformist ministers to resort thither and preach in their seditious conventicles without control’, thereby – according to a hostile source – ‘poisoning and depraving the people's loyalty and obedience to the government both of Church and State’.²³⁰ At York both magistrates and those impanelled to serve as jurors were notoriously lax in dealing with conventicles; in April 1682 the circuit judge at the local assizes bemoaned the ‘misgovernment’ of the place and reckoned that no more than two of the aldermen were fit for office.²³¹ But again the situation was most worrisome in London, where in the late 1670s and early 1680s the government found it impossible to bring indictments not only against religious nonconformists but even against those accused of high treason. During the course of 1681, London juries threw out indictments for treason brought against a number of notorious Whig activists, including Stephen College, Sir John Rouse, and Shaftesbury.²³² As Secretary of State Sir Leoline Jenkins complained to Ormonde in October 1681, the composition of jury panels in London and Middlesex was such ‘that the king cannot hope to have justice… in his own courts’.²³³

Local officials in town and countryside, such as the parish constables, beadles and nightwatchmen – being, as they were, unpaid mem-bers of the local community, typically of middling or even lower social status – often sympathized with those who worshipped in illegal conventicles (they were, after all, fellow Protestants) or who took to the streets in political demonstrations or riots, and were reluctant to make arrests.²³⁴ Even when local magistrates or law-enforcement agencies identified with the court and would have willingly initiated a clampdown on dissident activity, they would refuse to act if they suspected that public sentiment was hostile to such an attempt. The problem is well illustrated by what happened in December 1682 when the King sent orders to the (by now) Tory Lord Mayor of London to suppress nonconformist meetings. In response, thousands of people flocked to the meeting houses, ‘every man haveing a Lusty Kane in his hand’ to protect the nonconformist ministers from arrest. The mayor therefore did nothing, protesting that he would gladly act upon the King's orders, ‘But I clearly see mischiefe and ruine will follow it; you may read as much in the peopells faces.’²³⁵

It would be wrong to assume, then, that the alienation of public opinion mattered only in so far as it might potentially lead to a popular uprising. Widespread public dissatisfaction, electoral defeat at both the central and local level, and the reluctance of those in local-government service to act to defend the crown's interests against its open or perceived enemies meant that Charles experienced considerable difficulty in the basic task of ruling the country. To those at the centre of power, it seemed far from clear that the crown held all the trump cards.

On top of all this, however, there was indeed a genuine threat of rebellion. The Scots did rebel. The government's policy of intensified persecution had brought increasing conflict between conventiclers and authorities in 1678–9, and encouraged extremism. Then on 3 May 1679 a small band of covenanters, led by David Hackston of Rathillet, while apparently on the search for a local sheriff-depute who was a notorious persecutor, chanced to come across a coach carrying James Sharp, archbishop of St Andrews, at Magus Muir, just outside St Andrews. The group stopped the coach and brutally murdered the Archbishop in front of his own daughter and servants.²³⁶ The assassins then fled to the south-west, where they joined with other militant covenanters to plan a general uprising. On 29 May a group of about sixty to eighty armed men rode into Rutherglen on the outskirts of Glasgow, where they posted a declaration at the market cross proclaiming they had risen in defence of the covenants and protesting against the royal supremacy, episcopacy, the Indulgence, the commemoration of 29 May, and the Rescissory Act, before proceeding to burn all the ‘sinful and unlawful’ acts of parliament (as they styled them) ‘against our Covenanted Reformation’.²³⁷ Over the next few weeks their numbers swelled, and at its peak the covenanter army may have numbered some 8,000 men. In June, at the market cross in Hamilton, they posted another declaration, in which they detailed the ‘Cruelty, Injustice and Oppression’ they had suffered under episcopacy since the Restoration, proclaimed their desire to secure ‘the True Protestant Religion, and Presbyterian Government’ against the royal supremacy, and demanded both a free parliament and a general assembly ‘for preventing the Eminent Danger of Popery, and Extirpating of Prelacy from amongst Us’. They ended with a plea that ‘all things’ be restored to how the King ‘found them, when God brought him home to His Crown and Kingdoms’ in 1660.²³⁸

In the end, the rebellion was put down by government troops under the command of Monmouth, who easily overcame a woefully ill-equipped army of some 6,000 covenanters at Bothwell Bridge on 22 June. Nevertheless, the rebellion caused some nervous moments, not just for the authorities in Scotland, but also for those in England. In mid-June, for example, Secretary of State Henry Coventry received a letter from Bristol reporting how the numerous Scots in that city seemed ‘to be revived at their rebellion’ and warning that, if orders were not received from the central government ‘to keep this Citty in peace’, Bristol would soon ‘be in a Sad Condition’, since the city's conventicles consisted ‘of many persons able in body but weak in aprehension’ who might easily threaten ‘the peace of the Kingdome’.²³⁹ in England clearly sympathized with the Scots and hoped that their idol, Monmouth, would take the Scots’ side. Thus William Mandeville, a gentleman from Rotherham in Yorkshire, was found guilty of having said on 17 June that the Scottish rebels would ‘beat all England’ and that, ‘Though the Duke of Monmouth bee gone down to suppresse them, its thought hee is gone to take their and the Kirke's part.’ He had then added that he hoped ‘to see the Church downe and the priests buyred in their surplices; for I know noe good they do, but are a great charge to the parish in washing them’.²⁴⁰ Although Monmouth remained true to his trust, his speedy suppression of the uprising coupled with his subsequent pleas for leniency in dealing with the rebels merely served to increase his popularity north of the border, which could only be a worrying development for the authorities in the south. It may be significant that the scholars who staged the pope-burning in Edinburgh on Christmas Day 1680 wore blue ribbons in their hats with the motto ‘No Pope’ printed upon them; in England blue ribbons were worn to designate support for Monmouth's claim to the throne.²⁴¹

Following defeat at Bothwell Bridge, a group of militants under the leadership of Richard Cameron, an exiled minister who returned to Scotland in October 1679, continued to meet in field conventicles, proclaiming their opposition to the Scottish establishment. At Queensferry (on the southern side of what is now the Forth Bridge) on 3 June 1680, following a failed attempt to seize Donald Cargill, one of the leading figures in the Cameronian movement and a Bothwell fugitive, authorities found a paper called a ‘New-Covenant’, wherein the Cameronians engaged to ‘free the Church of God from the thraldom, tyranny, incroachment, and corruption of Prelacy… and Erastianism’. The Cameronians renounced the King and those who associated with him as their ‘lawful Rulers’, the ‘New-Covenant’ affirmed, ‘because standing in the way of our Right, free and peaceable serving of God… according to our Covenant’, and insisted that they would not ‘yield any willing obedience to them’ because they had ‘altered and destroyed the Lord's establish'd Religion, overturned the fundamental and established Laws of the Kingdom, taken altogether away Christ's Church and Government, and changed the Civil Government of this Land (which was by King and free Parliaments) into Tyranny’. The paper added that they would ‘no more commit the Government of our selves, and the making of Laws for us, to any one single Person, and lineal Successor… this kind of Government by a single Person, etc. being most liable to inconveniences, (as sad and long experience may now teach us,) and aptest to degenerate into Tyranny’. On 22 June 1680 Cameron and Cargill posted their radical manifesto ‘The Declaration and Testimony of the True-Presbyterian, Anti-Praelatick, and Anti-Erastian, Persecuted-Party in Scotland’ to the town cross at Sanquhar in Dumfriesshire. In it they condemned Charles II's ‘Usurpation in Church matters and Tyranny in matters Civil’, and proceeded to ‘disown Charles Stuart’, who had been ‘Tyrannizing on the throne of Scotland’ (alleging he had ‘forfaulted’ any right to the crown of Scotland ‘several years since by his Perjury and breach of Covenant with God and His Church’), and to ‘declare War against such a Tyrant and Usurper, and all the Men of his Practices’. They further stated that they disowned the Duke of York – ‘a professt Papist’ – and protested ‘against his succeeding to the Crown’.²⁴² Then on 12 September, at a large, armed field conventicle at Torwood, south-east of Stirling, Cargill proceeded to pass sentence of excommunication on Charles II as a ‘Tyrant, and Destroyer’, charging him with perjury for having renounced the Covenant, with ‘rescinding all Lawes for establishing the Reformation, and enacting Lawes contrarie thereunto’, with having employed the army ‘to destroy the Lords people’, and with ‘being an Enemy to true Protestants, and helper of the Papists, and hindering the execution of just Lawes against them’. He also excommunicated York, for idolatry, together with various other ministers of the crown (including Monmouth, for suppressing the Bothwell Bridge rebellion, and Lauderdale, for his apostasy from the Covenant and for persecuting the godly), and posted copies of the excommunication throughout Torwood.²⁴³

England may not have witnessed the same type of extremism as Scotland, but the situation south of the border nevertheless seemed potentially highly volatile. Opponents of Exclusion were quick to point out that the political opposition seemed to be engaged in exactly the same type of propaganda offensive that had been launched by John Pym and his associates on the eve of the English Civil War. Moreover, during the Exclusion Crisis – and unlike in the early 1640s – there was a viable pretender, Monmouth, who not only was a successful military commander but also had an extensive popular following. When York, then in exile in Brussels, learned of the passage of the first Exclusion Bill through the Commons in May 1679, he observed to his son-in-law, the Prince of Orange, how ‘it was the presbyterians and the Duke of Monmouth's friends carried it,’ and predicted that, if the King did not ‘entirely submit to them, and become less than a Duke of Venice’, they would ‘fly out into an open rebellion’.²⁴⁴ Such fears were not totally unfounded. Many Whigs openly admitted that they would take whatever measures might be necessary to protect their lives, liberties and estates in the event of a Catholic becoming king, even if this meant having recourse to armed resistance. In the Commons debate on Exclusion of 27 April 1679, Sir Thomas Player urged the need ‘to alter the oath in the Militia Act, about taking up arms against such as are commissioned by the King’; at the moment, he said, Protestants were under no ‘temptation to break that oath’, but ‘A Popish Successor’ might ‘send Popish Guards’ to cut their throats like dogs, yet under the terms of this oath ‘I must not take up arms to defend myself against such rogues.’²⁴⁵ Following the failure of the second Exclusion Bill in the Lords in November 1680, the Whigs proposed a Bill of Association, along the lines of that passed under Elizabeth in 1585, whereby Protestants would rise up to defend the Protestant realm should the Catholics murder the King and attempt to install his brother on the throne.²⁴⁶ On 30 December 1680 the Commons agreed to an address to the King begging him to exclude the Catholic heir and warning him that, if the crown ‘should descend to the duke of York, the opposition which may possibly be made to his possessing it’ might ‘not only endanger the further descent in the royal line, but even monarchy itself’. This, the Scottish lawyer Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall observed, was tantamount to the Commons boasting ‘that they will erect themselfes in a commonwealth’.²⁴⁷

The more extreme Whigs did contemplate rebellion. The possibility may have been first mooted at the time of the Oxford Parliament of March 1681, with some Whig peers allegedly talking about staying behind in London ready to raise the City should Exclusion fail yet again. Indeed, in the summer of 1681 a document was found in Shaftesbury's closet calling for an ‘Association’ of ‘all true Protestants’ to oppose York ‘by all lawful means, and by force of arms if need so required’, if he ever sought to set himself up as king, although the indictment against Shaftesbury on treason charges was thrown out by a Whig jury that November.²⁴⁸ By late 1682 and early 1683, however, plans were certainly being discussed for coordinated uprisings in various parts of England and Scotland, and many of the conspirators who survived the revelations of the so-called Rye House Plot in the summer of 1683 did end up joining with the Monmouth and Argyll rebellions of 1685.

Some of the talk that could be heard in the streets or alehouses across the land was giving serious cause for concern. We cannot take all accusations of seditious words at face value, of course. Some suits were undoubtedly vexatious. There were more cases after 1681, during the years of the Tory Reaction, when there was heightened government concern about the possibility of conspiratorial activity by disaffected Whigs, than during the years of the Exclusion Crisis, when the domination of local government by the Whigs made successful prosecution of Whig sympathizers more difficult. Some charges brought after 1682 referred to words allegedly spoken much earlier; what is impossible to tell is whether it was only as the Tories strengthened their hold on the machinery of law enforcement that it became possible to bring such prosecutions, or whether the time that had lapsed since the date of the alleged offence suggests that people were taking advantage of government phobias to use the law to strike out at their local enemies. Nor does the knowledge of whether the prosecution was successful or not necessarily help, because of the blatantly partisan decisions of packed juries: Whig jurors of 1679–81 were typically highly reluctant to convict their political fellow-travellers, no matter how convincing the evidence against them, while Tory jurors during the years of the Tory Reaction were often all too credulous when it came to convicting their political opponents.

Despite all these caveats, however, cases of sedition can nevertheless still be revealing; the words charged were often so specific that they suggest some basis in reality and probably reflect the sorts of concern that were being articulated at the local level. And they suggest that for some people, at least, disaffection ran so deep that they were eager to see a regime change. In March 1679 one Leicester man was accused of saying ‘That King Charles the First was a papist which brought him to the Block, and his hand and Seale was at the Rebellion in Ireland And that his death was Just’.²⁴⁹ A couple of months later a Yorkshire Quaker was alleged to have forecast that ‘The Parliament will downe with the Lords and Bishopps, and will doe with this King as they did with last.’²⁵⁰ Shortly after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, a London tailor was accused of having said that ‘the King was as great a Papist as the Duke of York’ and that he wondered why ‘the Parliament doth not chop off his head’;²⁵¹ a Northamptonshire knight was supposedly holding forth to the ‘substantial freeholders and considerable men’ in the county ‘that they must stand up for their liberties and properties, which were like to be invaded by arbitrary government, and their religion, by Popery’, magnifying ‘the power of parliaments and great privileges of the people’;²⁵² while a Yorkshire correspondent could report that ‘many’ in the Peniston area spoke ‘treason’ and were in favour of ‘a commonwealth’.²⁵³ In late July 1681 a bookseller from near the Old Exchange in London was committed for having said that ‘he knew of engines at work to depose the King, and that he hoped to see a Commonwealth again in England.’²⁵⁴ In the autumn of 1682 informations were brought against one Ferdinando Gorges for various seditious speeches allegedly uttered some two years earlier, in which he had (among other things) condemned the King for being a papist and a whoremonger who must not be allowed to ‘fright honest men out of their rights and privileges’, since ‘a King was no more than a private man to the laws of the land and must be subject to them’, adding that ‘the Parliament and the rest of the good subjects were fools, if they did not compel him to it, as they did his father.’²⁵⁵ Similarly, Edward Whitaker was convicted in October 1682 for supposedly saying at Bath towards the end of July 1680 ‘that the late King was putt to death by a judiciall processe, and not murder'd’, and that the people had a right ‘to call a parliament every year, and they ought to sitt, whither called or not’.²⁵⁶ In November 1684 a prosecution was brought against Yorkshireman James Appleby for words spoken back in 1679 when he tried to confiscate a gun from a local Catholic, William Orfeur. When Orfeur asked whether Appleby had the King's commission to act, Appleby replied that ‘he had better warrant’ than that, namely ‘the fundamentall laws of the kingdom’, adding that ‘he hop'd in a few days now that the Commonwealth of England should be once up againe’, so that they could be rid of both the King and the papists. ‘The law hath as good right to try a king as a subject,’ he proclaimed – witness ‘the fair tryall of the last King Charles the First. And the same law hath the same power over this Charles the Second,’ he would see ‘before he be a yeare elder’. Appleby's kinsman Edward was also charged at the same time with having ‘made use of strong sophisticall arguments to the disparagement of monarchicall government in England’ back in the spring of 1678, when he had supposedly claimed that Charles I had deserved to be executed for attempting to introduce popery and ‘murdering his subjects in Ireland’, which was ‘worse then the massacres of France’, warning that ‘Charles the Second was going the same rode, and had made further progress in the same… and consequently better deserved to undergoe the same punishment then his father.’²⁵⁷

3

Fearing for the Safety of the People

The Popish Plot, Exclusion and the Nature of the Whig Challenge, c. 1678 – 1681