AT ROCHESTER on 23 December 1688, King James II of England, who had reigned less than four years, fled into exile. It was the second time in forty years that the English had dethroned a king.
There was to be none of the high tragedy of the trial and execution of Charles I, James’s father, the last time the English rid themselves of a king. Instead, James’s downfall was a pitiable farce. He had already tried – and somehow failed – to flee from his subjects a fortnight earlier on the 11th, when, after throwing the Great Seal in the Thames, he rode disguised as an ordinary country gentleman to the north Kent coast. There he embarked for France. But his boat was intercepted by suspicious and disrespectful fishermen and forced back to Faversham. And even his second attempt at flight succeeded only with the connivance of his son-in-law and usurper, William III, who sensibly wanted him out of the way.
But, despite these elements of black humour, James’s dethronement brought about lasting change in a way which his father’s hadn’t. This, the second part of the book, tells the story of how this came about. It follows the resulting spread of the values of property, prosperity and freedom from these islands across the globe. And it shows that – despite some conspicuous exceptions – individual kings and queens tended to help rather than hinder the process.
But it begins at the monarchy’s lowest point, by explaining how the House of Stuart lost the throne again only thirty years after James’s elder brother, Charles II, had regained it in the Restoration of 1660. The old issues of religion and succession had arisen once more. But so too did a new question: which model of modernity should the British monarchy follow – the French or the Dutch? At stake were fundamental choices: between persecution and religious toleration, between absolutism and government by consent, and between success and failure.
I
Outside the Banqueting House in Westminster every Friday from June 1660 a huge crowd waited impatiently to be admitted into the presence of their newly restored sovereign, King Charles II. Many of them may well have remembered a very different scene at this same spot eleven years previously, when King Charles I had been publicly beheaded following his trial for treason.
But now England’s experiment with republicanism was at an end, and once more a son of the House of Stuart sat beneath the canopy of state to receive his people. But they were here not merely to pay their respects. They had come instead to be cured by the magical caress of their sovereign, for it was firmly believed that the king’s hands could banish scrofula, a disfiguring tuberculosis of the lymph nodes. Every Friday Charles would touch for the King’s Evil, and over the course of his reign he would lay his hands on more than 90,000 of his grateful subjects.
The ceremony of touching for the King’s Evil was a sign of the divine nature of English kingship. But ever since the reign of Henry VIII, the connection between divinity and kingship had been more than mystical – it was political.
The assumption of religious authority was an enormous boost to royal power and prestige, but for Henry’s successors the Supremacy had proved to be something of a poisoned chalice as inevitably, the monarchy had become the focus of the violent religious conflicts provoked by the Protestant Reformation. Charles II had grown up as these disputes reached their culmination in political meltdown, civil war and regicide. Now he had been swept back with popular rejoicing to take the crown that had been abolished with his father’s execution. He would soon find, however, that the quarrels that had led England into civil war were far from settled.
At first sight, King Charles was well suited to pick his way through the political quagmire that followed Cromwell’s death. Charles I had lost the throne by his unbending adherence to principle: to the authority of the king in the state and of the bishops in the Church. In contrast, the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member. He fathered at least fourteen children by nine different mothers and more or less singlehandedly repopulated the depleted ranks of the English nobility. When he was egregiously hailed as ‘Father of his people’, Charles laughed, replying that he had certainly fathered a great number of them.
Otherwise there was nothing to which he would not stoop his six-foot frame; no corner, however tight, which he could not turn; and no loyalty, however deep, which – once it ceased to be convenient – he recognized as binding.
Like many such men, he had an easy charm. He was affable, good humoured and witty, though his intelligence was practical rather than scholarly. But he was as lazy as he was treacherous, and only really applied himself when his back was to the wall. In short, Charles could ride almost any tide. But steering a consistent course was beyond him.
The first test of both Charles’s resolution and his honesty came over religion. As one MP said, the principles of the restored monarchy were that Charles should ‘not be king of this or that party, but to be king of all’. Charles realized that it was good politics to live up to this. In the Declaration of Breda, the manifesto that had helped win him the throne, Charles had made an unequivocal promise of ‘liberty to tender consciences’, or religious toleration, for all the disparate groups that had rebelled against the Stuart monarchy. All the other undertakings of Breda – about disputed title to land, war crimes and arrears of army pay – were swiftly passed into legislation by the Convention Parliament, often using the precise, carefully chosen words of the Declaration itself.
But not religious toleration. Before the Civil War, Parliament had split over the intertwined issues of royal power and religion. The king’s Anglican supporters took as their biblical text Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he states that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’. Anglicans interpreted this to mean that their highest religious duty was to obey the monarch, no matter what he did.
Opposing them were the Presbyterians, and other more extreme Protestant dissenting sects, who countered with Peter’s saying in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘It is better to obey God than man.’ These opponents of absolute royal power had won the Civil War, but with the Restoration they had lost the peace.
In the elections to Charles’s first parliament those who had fought alongside his father to defend the established Church of England and the king’s role as its supreme governor were returned in large numbers, hence its nickname, the ‘Cavalier Parliament’. In the political ascendant at last, the Cavaliers insisted on the enforcement of rigid Anglican conformity by oaths to be administered on all clergymen, dons, teachers and members of town and city corporations.
The result was known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles’s chief minister and Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. There is dispute as to whether Hyde had planned to subvert Charles’s offer of toleration all along or whether he simply took advantage of circumstances. But there is no doubt that the Code reflected Clarendon’s view that the Church of England was the only true Church and that only the Church of England taught the proper obedience of subjects to the king.
Charles had little sympathy with the Church’s Protestant opponents, whom he blamed for the Civil War and his father’s execution. But with Roman Catholics it was a very different story. The queen mother, Henrietta Maria, was a proselytizing Catholic, and there were persistent rumours that Charles himself had converted to Catholicism, or at least was dangerously partial to it. In fact he had few firm beliefs, and deplored the intolerant zeal of every group. As he said, he ‘should be glad that those distinctions between his subjects might be removed; and that whilst they were all equally good subjects, they might equally enjoy his protection’. Charles sought to address these problems – and to salve his conscience over the broken promise of toleration in the Declaration of Breda – by issuing a second declaration in December 1662. It referred to the king’s discretionary power to ‘dispense’ with the Clarendon Code for both Protestants and Catholics who ‘modestly and without scandal performed their devotions in their own way’, and called on Parliament to pass an Act to make such a suspension of the Code general and permanent.
But the ultra-royalist Cavalier House of Commons, with its hard-line Anglican majority and absolute loyalty to the monarchy, refused their monarch point blank. They had not fought the Civil War and suffered under Cromwell to see the monarchy adopt their enemies’ principles. And Charles, aware above all that Anglicans were the strongest supporters of the restored monarchy, had to acquiesce.
II
Afteran opportunity for the decisive action – and the glory – of war. these domestic frustrations, foreign policy seemed to offer
The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. After surviving – with English help that was neither consistently given nor very effective when it was – the Spanish attempt at reconquest in the late sixteenth century, the Dutch had gone on to become an economic superpower that threatened to take over English trade. The English had already tried to cut them down to size in the first Anglo-Dutch War in the 1650s. Now Charles was persuaded that he should seek to outdo Cromwell by launching a second conflict.
The war began well with the great victory of Lowestoft in 1665, when the fleet, commanded in person by Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, as Lord Admiral, defeated the enemy and blew up the Dutch flagship, together with the Dutch commander, Admiral Opdam. But then the attempted seizure of the Dutch East Indies fleet in a neutral port misfired; the domestic disasters of the Great Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year hampered the war effort and things hit rock bottom when the Dutch admiral De Ruyter sailed up the Medway, where the English fleet was anchored, captured the flagship the Royal Charles, on which the king had returned to England in 1660, burnt others and forced the rest to scatter and beach themselves. As was said in London, ‘The bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the King neglects all, and the Dutch take all.’
It was a national disaster, which led to a profound bout of introspection. ‘In all things,’ reflected the diarist Samuel Pepys, who was in the thick of events as a naval administrator, ‘in wisdom, courage, force, knowledge of our own streams, and success, the Dutch have the best of us, and do end the war with victory on their side.’ Why was England apparently so feeble in defending even its own shores? A spate of books on the Dutch rushed to offer the explanation. The most interesting is Sir Josiah Child’s Brief Observations Concerning Trade and the Interest of Money. Written even before the war was over, it argued that the Dutch Republic was so strong because it had developed secure financial institutions that gave it long-term security and the ability to wage war and expand its commerce, in spite of its geographical disadvantages. Most European monarchs had made a habit, when financially squeezed by the demands of war, of repudiating their creditors, which meant they could only borrow at a high rate of interest. But through the Bank of Amsterdam, with its enviable reputation for honouring its debts, the Dutch could borrow cheaply: a financial advantage that translated into military strength. And Child is to be taken seriously, since he was an expert on finance, having built up one of the greatest City fortunes of his day. Other authors pointed to Dutch religious toleration, which gave the republic domestic peace, as opposed to the civil wars produced by persecution in England. And others again to the superiority of Dutch hygiene, education, poor relief and technical expertise.
Why not, in short, imitate the Dutch instead of fighting them? Why not even ally with them? Especially since a new potent threat to England’s security was arising in Louis XIV’s aggressive, Catholicizing France.
III
France offered an alternative model for a modernizing monarchy. If the Dutch owed their success to innovative republican institutions and consensual government that had made a small and disunited country a world power, then France had become strong by following the opposite path.
France, like England, had been torn apart by civil war in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. But the wars, known as the Fronde, were very different. Instead of pitting the king against his subjects, they were a quarrel within the highest ranks of the nobility and the royal family itself. They came to an end at roughly the same time, however, when in 1661 the twenty-three-year-old Louis XIV, who had been king since the age of five, began his personal rule.
Louis was Charles’s first cousin and the two were similar in appearance, with their powerful physique, swarthy complexion, full lips and hooked nose. They also shared the same insatiable sexual appetite. But there the resemblance ended.
For Louis – despite his lustfulness – was a man of rigid dignity, inflexible will and unbending self-discipline. His iron self-control meant, for instance, that he was able to give a public audience immediately after an operation, without anaesthetic of course, to treat an anal fistula. And what he expected of himself, he demanded of others.
Louis’s motto, seen to this day on the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at the heart of his great palace of Versailles, was Le Roy gouverne par lui-même: ‘the King rules by himself ’. This meant that there would be no great minister or corrupt court faction – or even parliament – to come between the king and his people. Instead, he, Louis, would personally direct a close-knit group of departmental officials. They came from modest backgrounds and shared Louis’s appetite for hard work and belief in discipline. Above all, they were at one with his commitment to the glory of France and her king.
Colbert, the minister of finance, directed an ambitious programme of state-sponsored industrial growth and overseas imperial expansion; Vauban, a military architect of genius, protected France’s borders with vast fortifications; Louvois, the minister of war, reorganized the army and oversaw a series of aggressive campaigns that expanded French territory towards her ‘natural frontier’ on the Rhine and beyond; even the arts – painting, music, architecture, the theatre and science – were subjected to central direction and made to hymn the glories of le Roy soleil, ‘the Sun King’.
And the medicine seemed to work as, in little more than a decade, France turned from the sick man of Europe into the European superpower. It also became the very model of a modern monarchy.
The rise of France posed for the English the same dilemma as the earlier rise of the Dutch. How would the English see the new France? As a threat? Or as a model?
For most of Charles’s subjects, Louis’s aggressive Catholicism meant that the issue was not in doubt: France not only threatened to become a universal monarchy but – what was even worse – a universal Catholic monarchy.
The result was that when, less than a year after the debacle of the Battle of the Medway, England not only made peace with the Dutch but joined them in an alliance against France, the news was greeted with widespread rejoicing.
But not by Charles. The king harboured a grudge against the Dutch for the stain on his honour of defeat by a mere republic. He also took a very different view of both Louis and Catholicism from most of his subjects. Partly it was a matter of family connection. Charles himself was half French through his mother, Henrietta Maria. And the ties were strengthened when his youngest sister, also named Henrietta Maria, married Louis’s brother, Philippe, Duke of Orleans. Henrietta, who was as intelligent as she was pretty, promptly became a firm favourite of Louis (indeed, his interest was rumoured to be more than brotherly) and a powerful conduit between the two courts.
And there was a similar family inclination to Catholicism. So when in 1668 Charles’s brother James informed him that he had converted to Rome, Charles, far from expressing horror, confided in him his intention to do the same. It remained only to work out the means.
A secret meeting was summoned on 25 January 1669 in James’s private closet or study, at which only the king, his brother and three confidential advisers were present. Tearfully Charles explained his determination to adopt the true faith. But how? The fear of a Catholicized monarchy was, as everyone knew, enough to rouse Englishmen to arms. In the face of this threat the rest unanimously advised him to inform Louis and seek his powerful advice and assistance.
Charles and Louis had already opened secret negotiations, with Henrietta Maria, Duchess of Orleans, as go-between, for a renversement d’alliances that would see England and France joining together to make war on the Dutch. Now Charles’s professed resolution to convert to Catholicism drove the stakes still higher.
It took over a year to reach agreement. Finally, in May 1670, under cover of a flying visit by the Duchess of Orleans to see her brother, the secret Treaty of Dover was signed. (It was so called because it was so closely guarded that most of Charles’s ministers were not informed of its existence.) In it, Charles reaffirmed his ‘plan to reconcile himself with the Roman Church’, while Louis, for his part, promised Charles a subsidy of 2 million livres to help him suppress any armed resistance to his conversion, together, if need be, with 6000 French troops. The two monarchs were then to coordinate an attack on the Netherlands, with Louis bearing the brunt of the land war and Charles the naval.
Was Charles’s undertaking to convert real? Or a diplomatic ploy that proved too clever by half ? In any case, though the actual text of the Treaty of Dover remained a closely guarded secret, the rumours surrounding it led to a dangerous polarization in English politics. The worst fears of Charles’s opponents were confirmed by the final steps that led to the outbreak of war. On 5 January 1672 Charles unilaterally suspended all payments from the Exchequer for a year; on 15 March he published the Declaration of Indulgence, which, on the model of the abortive declaration of a decade earlier, used the royal prerogative to suspend the Clarendon Code for Catholics as well as Protestant dissenters. Then, two days later, he joined Louis in declaring war on the Dutch.
The effect was to reconfirm the fatal association in the public mind of arbitrary government with Catholicism and an unpopular – and, as it turned out, unsuccessful – foreign policy. For the Dutch, despite the French occupying five out of their seven provinces, refused to roll over. Instead, they broke the dykes and used the flood waters to stop the French advance into the heartland of Holland. Still worse, from Charles’s point of view, the man who led the heroic Dutch resistance was his own nephew, William, Prince of Orange.
For the system of hereditary monarchy meant that the rivalries of the great European powers were also family quarrels. France was ruled by King Charles’s cousin, Louis XIV, while France’s Continental rival Holland was ruled by his nephew William, the son of Charles’s eldest sister, Mary, Princess Royal of England, and William II, Prince of Orange.
But William III was a very different ruler from Louis, the Sun King, the absolute monarch of all he surveyed. For the head of the House of Orange was not sovereign in the Dutch Republic, but first among equals. Sovereignty instead resided in the Estates of the seven provinces. But ever since William the Silent’s leadership of the Dutch Revolt against Spain in the late sixteenth century, his descendants as Princes of Orange had traditionally been made stadholder or governor of each of the provinces and captain general and admiral of the armed forces of the republic.
It was an important position. But to exploit its potential required talent and tact on the part of the reigning prince. He also had to cope with strong republican elements among the Dutch urban elites, who were jealous of the quasi-regal pretensions of the House of Orange and were determined to cut it down to size. William would prove more than equal to the task.
His beginnings were inauspicious enough, however. In 1649 his English grandfather, Charles I, was executed, and the following year his own father died of smallpox at the age of only twenty-four. Eight days later, on 14 November 1650, William was born as a posthumous child in a black-hung bedchamber.
Quarrels between his widowed mother, Princess Mary, and his grandmother, Princess Dowager Amalia, for his guardianship played into the hands of the anti-Orange faction in the republic, led by the Grand Pensionary or chief administrator of Holland, De Witt, who not only managed to withhold the family’s traditional offices from the young prince but even went so far as to abolish them.
None of this had much impact on the young prince, who was brought up in his birthplace, the Binnenhof Palace in The Hague – first in his mother’s apartment and then in his own. At the age of six he was given his first tutor, a local clergyman, and at the age of nine a governor, who came from the cadet Nassau branch of the princely house.
From his tutor he absorbed a firm Calvinistic Protestantism and from his governor a sense of the historic destiny of the House of Orange – and a passionate love of hunting. He also emerged as a man’s man, with little time for women but a lot for attractive young men.
And all of these things – his religiosity, his family pride, even his homoeroticism – came together in the crisis of 1672 when he discovered his lifelong vocation as leader of the military resistance to French hegemony and the champion of Protestantism – first in the Netherlands and then throughout Europe.
William was not the only Protestant in Charles’s family. Only a few months after the Restoration, Charles’s brother James, Duke of York, had married Anne Hyde, daughter of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, the author of the notorious Code that defended the Church of England against Catholics and dissenters. Many, including the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, were scandalized at the mésalliance between a prince and a commoner. But Anne proved a dignified duchess and a loyal wife. She also brought up her two daughters, Mary and Anne, as committed Anglican Protestants despite their father’s zealous devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.
And this Protestant grouping within the royal family became even stronger in 1677, when, as a result of the perpetual switchback of politics at Charles’s court between Protestantism and Catholicism and France and the Netherlands, it was decided that William of Orange should marry his cousin, James and Anne’s eldest daughter Mary. Charles’s alliance with Louis and James’s Catholicism had outraged the nation. It seemed as if the suspiciously Catholic royal court was subverting the national religion by joining Louis’s campaigns against the Netherlands. The sudden U-turn to a marriage alliance with the Protestant Dutch Republic was intended to reassure the public and Parliament.
The wedding took place at Whitehall on 4 November 1677, the prince’s birthday. Despite the auspicious anniversary, however, the marriage was hardly a meeting of minds – or bodies. The fifteen-year-old Mary, beautiful and vivacious, towered over the dour bridegroom, who, despite his reputation as a warrior prince, was weak in body, hunched and asthmatic. She is said to have wept for a day and a half when she was told she was going to marry the Dutchman; while William, for his part, had made prudential enquiries via the wife of the English ambassador in The Hague as to Mary’s suitability for a man like himself, who ‘might not perhaps be very easy for a wife to live with’.
The answers seem to have satisfied him. And, after a shaky start, the forecast proved to be correct. Rumours of pregnancies soon dried up and Mary was jealous of William’s quick and, as it turned out, lifelong attachment to her lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Villiers. But this was an affair of the head rather than the heart, and William and Mary soon became mutually devoted. Indeed, Mary would put her loyalty to her husband above that to her own father. English history would have been very different otherwise.
IV
The marriage of William and Mary took on a further significance. Mary would inherit the English throne after her father James died, and would then, of course, bring her kingdom’s might into alliance with William’s Holland. For Mary and her younger sister Anne were the only legitimate children of the royal house of the younger generation. William himself was fourth in line, after his wife and sister-in-law.
For King Charles, so philoprogenitive with other women, had no children with his wife, Catherine of Braganza. When Charles had first seen the princess, with her hair dressed in long projecting ringlets in the Portuguese fashion, he is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘they have brought me a bat!’ But, despite her repeated miscarriages and at least one serious exploration of the possibility of divorce on grounds of her barrenness, Charles – perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of affection – stuck with her.
The result was a replay of the twin crises of religion, in the form of the Royal Supremacy over the Church, and the succession, which had plagued English politics since the reign of Henry VIII. Known as the Exclusion Crisis, because it focused on the attempt to exclude Charles’s brother James from the succession, it threatened to set the Stuarts on their travels once more. And his handling of it showed Charles at his best – and worst.
James was made of very different stuff from his sinuous elder brother Charles. Every bit as highly sexed (indeed, he slept with a stream of common whores so ugly that wits claimed they had been prescribed as penance by his confessor!), James was otherwise formal, unimaginative and good at receiving orders and delegating them to subordinates. In short, there was something in him of the centurion in the Bible who told Jesus: ‘I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and when I say to this man, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come and he cometh.’
So it was with James. Unlike Charles, who regarded his secret and half-hearted attachment to Catholicism as a matter of mere diplomatic and political expediency, James, after he had embraced the true faith as he saw it, never once deviated from it in word or deed: ‘it was like a rod of steel running through thirty years.’
It was also to prove an absolute line of divide in English history.
The first test of James’s resolve came quickly. In February 1673 the strongly Anglican Parliament was recalled and immediately set itself to force the king to overturn the Declaration of Indulgence. Lured by a generous promise of taxation, Charles agreed. Parliament then pressed home its advantage by passing the Test Act. This banned from all public office, civil or military, anyone who would not swear to the Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy; take communion according to the rite of the Church of England; and – just to make sure – sign a declaration against the key Catholic belief of transubstantiation, by which the bread and wine in the mass were held to become the actual body and blood of Christ.
James, as Lord Admiral, held such a public office; but, as a now convinced Catholic, he could take neither the required oaths nor the Anglican sacrament. The deadline for swearing the oaths was 14 June; that day James surrendered the Admiralty to the king. His resignation resolved the immediate issue; it raised, however, a much bigger one: if, as a Roman Catholic, James could not be Lord Admiral, how could he be entrusted with the infinitely greater responsibility of kingship? And, if not, could Parliament break the sacred line of succession and the integrity of its monarchy for the sake of its religion? It seemed like another version of resistance theory, this time in the name of the Church of England.
But down that route most respectable Englishmen, traumatized by the execution of Charles I, were not prepared to go – unless something very extraordinary occurred.
In the late summer of 1678, the extraordinary duly happened in the shape of the Popish Plot. It is one of the strangest episodes of mass delusion and hysteria in English history; it starred one of the most remarkable hoaxers, Titus Oates, while its setting was the teeming metropolis of London, where Parliament, court and city all lived cheek by jowl with what was now the largest urban population in Europe. It was where men went to make their careers – and to disappear.
One of those – perhaps with more to escape from than most – was Titus Oates. Lame, stunted, homosexual and extraordinarily ugly (his mouth was described as being in the middle of his face), he had failed at everything. He had been expelled from school; passed through two Cambridge colleges without getting a degree; been ordained on false pretences and driven out of his parish for making a false accusation of sodomy; been cashiered as a naval chaplain for committing buggery himself; and finally, after a probably false conversion to Catholicism, he had been frogmarched out of no less than three Jesuit seminaries.
By July 1678, the twenty-nine-year-old Oates was back in London and desperate for survival – and for revenge on the world in general and on Catholics in particular. His scheme was to invent a gigantic Catholic conspiracy, masterminded by his erstwhile teachers, the Jesuits, to murder Charles and forcibly reconvert England. He found a willing listener in a fanatically anti-Catholic clergyman and, at his suggestion, wrote the whole thing up in the form of a deposition of forty-three articles.
On 13 August, a copy was handed to Charles while he was taking his usual brisk morning walk in St James’s Park; on 6 September Oates also swore to the truth of his deposition before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a fashionable, rather publicity-seeking magistrate; and on 28/29 September Oates appeared before the Privy Council itself.
Charles shredded his evidence from his own knowledge. But his advisers, from a mixture of motives, were inclined to take Oates more seriously and gave him a free hand to arrest the alleged plotters. And here Oates, for the first time in his life, struck lucky. Anne, Duchess of York, had died in 1671, and two years later James had remarried the Catholic Mary of Modena. One of those Oates accused was Edward Coleman, Mary of Modena’s secretary.
Coleman was almost as great a fantasist as Oates himself. Unfortunately, he had tried to put his schemes into action by soliciting money from Père la Chaise, Louis XIV’s highly influential confessor. Copies of the correspondence were discovered when his papers were searched and they contained a damning paragraph: ‘Success for his schemes’, Coleman wrote, ‘would give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it had received since its birth … They had a mighty work on their hands, no less than the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of a pestilent heresy, which had so long domineered over great part of the northern world.’ Here at last, it seemed, was proof positive of Oates’s allegations, with a conspiracy extending to the heart of the royal family itself.
Oates’s winning streak continued, even more sensationally, when Justice Godfrey, before whom he had sworn his deposition, disappeared in mysterious circumstances on 12 October. Already that evening rumours were sweeping through the city that he had been murdered by the Papists. Five days later the rumours seemed to be confirmed when his body was found face down in a ditch on Primrose Hill. There was heavy bruising round his neck and his own sword had been driven through his heart so hard that the point protruded several inches from his back. Despite the violence, however, none of his valuables had been taken.
Even at the time, some suspected that the death was a suicide disguised as a murder. But such doubts were brushed aside and the coroner’s jury returned the verdict of ‘murder’. And there was no doubt in the popular mind that it was murder by Oates’s Papist conspirators. Godfrey was now reinvented as a Protestant martyr. His body was laid in state in his house and, on 31 October, given an impressive funeral at St Martin-in-the-Fields, at which the preacher preached a fiery sermon on the text ‘As a man falleth before the wicked, so fallest thou’. Medals were struck in his honour and pamphlets written.
Fears of a massacre of Protestants now swept the capital; the preacher at Godrey’s funeral stood between two heavies dressed as clergymen and ladies carried daggers inscribed ‘Remember Justice Godfrey’ for their own protection from Catholic assassins.
In the midst of all this, on 21 October 1678, Parliament assembled. As the hysteria of the plot gathered force, no fewer than thirty-five people, mostly Catholic priests, were condemned to the hideous death of a traitor on the mere say-so of Oates and his steadily increasing band of associate informers.
But the parliamentary opposition, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, aimed at the biggest Catholic target of all: James, Duke of York, the king’s brother and the heir presumptive of the imperial crown of Britain.
V
Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the most complex and controversial figures of a complex and controversial age. He was very short, had strongly marked features and was known as ‘Tapski’, from the tube and tap which, in a dangerous and innovatory operation, had been inserted by his physician, John Locke, into his abdomen to drain an abscess on his liver.
His career was pretty fraught too, as he shifted, not always in the same direction, from being one of Cromwell’s ministers to Charles’s Lord Chancellor. From that exalted position he moved into opposition once again, to become one of the king’s greatest and most dangerous opponents. For he was bold, unscrupulous, demagogic and a master of propaganda. As such, he chose the most modern and emotive icon as the symbol of his political strategy. The Monument, built to commemorate the Great Fire of London, and finished in 1677, just a year before the outbreak of the Popish Plot, was a modern marvel – at 202 feet, the highest vantage point in the city and rivalled only by the spires of one or two of Wren’s equally new, rebuilt churches, which had likewise risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the fire.
And the Monument was the sensational setting of the most effective piece of propaganda to emerge from Shaftesbury’s circle. Entitled An Appeal from the Country to the City, it enjoined Londoners to climb the 311 steps to the top of ‘your newest pyramid’ and admire the rebuilt city. Then they should imagine it on fire once more; the guns of the Tower turned on the city; the streets running with blood and the fires of Smithfield burning their Protestant victims at the stake again, as they had done in the reign of the last Roman Catholic monarch, Bloody Mary.
All this would happen, the Appeal insisted, if a Catholic king were allowed to succeed.
The Appeal didn’t name James directly. Instead, keeping up the topicality, it alluded to the bas-relief on the base of the Monument, which shows James assisting his brother Charles to extinguish the Great Fire. All this was a sham, it announced. Instead ‘one eminent Papist’ – James – had connived at the disaster, ‘pretend[ing] to secure many of the incendiaries’ – thought to be Catholic, of course – ‘but secretly suffer[ing]them all to escape … for a Popish successor cannot but rejoice in the flames of such a too powerful city’.
Fired by such propaganda, between 1679 and 1681 the electorate returned three parliaments in which there was a clear Commons majority for James’s exclusion. Each was quickly dissolved by Charles, who was prepared to concede limitations on James’s powers as king but would not yield on his brother’s indefeasible hereditary right to succeed.
Charles also had more cards than it at first seemed. The first was the division among his opponents about who should succeed if James were excluded. The more moderate Exclusionists favoured the Dutch line and wanted the succession to leapfrog a generation so that James’s daughter Mary would become queen on Charles’s death. Her marriage to the champion of Protestant Europe, William of Orange, satisfied everyone that the monarchy’s association with French Catholicism would then be over for good. But Shaftesbury and the radicals backed instead Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth.
Born in 1649 of Charles’s affair with Lucy Walter, his first serious liaison, and made Duke of Monmouth in 1662, James was handsome, charming, charismatic and amorous. He was also spoiled, badly educated, sensitive about his illegitimacy and, having been personally involved in both a mutilation and a murder, had an ugly streak of violence. The army was a natural career for such a man, and by 1678 he had succeeded to Oliver Cromwell’s old office of Captain General or Commander-in-Chief and won what military glory was available under Charles. More importantly than all that, Monmouth was unequivocally, ostentatiously Protestant.
The Popish Plot and the ensuing Exclusion Crisis made Monmouth – popular, Protestant and princely – an obvious alternative to the dour and Catholic James and a natural ally for Shaftesbury.
The only problem was his illegitimacy. But was he illegitimate? Rumours, carefully fanned by Monmouth himself, circulated to the effect that his parents had been secretly married. There were supposed to be witnesses and a black box containing irrefutable written evidence.
But Charles, fond though he was of the strapping first fruit of his loins, was not prepared to allow Monmouth to shunt his legitimate brother James aside. Indefeasible hereditary right could not be undermined, however high the stakes. For this was the deepest principle of the Stuart dynasty. The result was one of the stranger scenes in English history when, in early January 1679, Charles, having summoned the Privy Council, solemnly declared ‘in the presence of Almighty God that he had never given or made any contract of marriage, nor was ever married to any woman whatsoever but his wife Queen Catherine’. The declaration was then signed by the king, witnessed by those present and enrolled in the records in Chancery.
In a further, vain attempt to lower the temperature, both rivals for the throne, first James and then Monmouth, were packed off into honourable exile. James, unwisely, went to Catholic Brussels before being made Governor of Scotland, while Monmouth went to Holland, where he was correctly but coolly received by Mary and William of Orange, his Protestant rivals for the succession.
The inability of the Exclusionists to agree on a single candidate was one thing strengthening the hand of Charles and James; the other was the perceived extremism of the Exclusionists of whatever stripe. For everything – their language, their demagogy, their violent anti-popery, their allies among the Protestant sects – revived uncomfortable memories of the Civil War.
The result was a pamphlet war and a clash of ideas out of which was born our modern two-party system. The Exclusionists were known as Whigs, or Scottish Covenanting rebels; the anti-Exclusionists as Tories, or Irish outlaws and cattle thieves.
The Whigs believed in religious toleration, limited government and a kingship that finally answered to the people; the Tories in divine right monarchy, indefeasible hereditary succession, passive obedience and a monopolistic Church of England that was equally hostile to Catholics on the right and to Protestant dissenters on the left. The Whigs were pro-Dutch; the Tories generally pro-French. The Whigs had made the running in the Exclusion Crisis; now it was the Tories’ turn.
For they made the forceful point that there was no precedent for preventing the next in line from taking his or her rightful inheritance. Mary Queen of Scots was an example of a Catholic heir. She had been executed before she could succeed Elizabeth, but that was because of her treason, not her religion. The Tories also pointed out that if James were excluded from the throne, the monarchy would be ruined for ever. In effect, England would become a republic. The nominal ruler would come to the throne only if he or she met the conditions laid down in advance by Parliament. However much Anglicans detested Catholicism, the alternative prospect of an elected, circumscribed monarchy was many times worse. In this Tory scenario, the Exclusionists were portrayed as modern Cromwellians, who were refighting the Civil War and attempting to destroy the monarchy and the Church of England. It was an emotional – and effective – appeal to English loyalties.
Charles met his fourth parliament in the Convocation Hall at Oxford. The Commons and Shaftesbury’s group in the Lords were, as usual, hot for Exclusion. But Charles, sensing the turning of the political tide, stood firm. ‘I have law and reason and all right-thinking men on my side; I have the Church’ – and here the king pointed to the bishops – ‘and nothing will ever separate us.’
After sitting for a bare week, the parliament was dissolved. Nor, thanks to a new subsidy from Louis XIV and booming revenues from trade, did Charles ever have to summon another one. Instead, he could turn to the congenial task of taking his revenge on Shaftesbury and Whigs for the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. Charles began by attacking the stronghold of the Whigs in the City and the other towns’ corporations. Their charters were revoked and their governing bodies purged of dissenters and Whigs and packed with Tories.
In despair at the sudden turn of events, the Whig leaders now made the mistake of dabbling, very half-heartedly, in treason. A faction plotted to assassinate Charles and James, and put Monmouth on the throne. It was badly planned and attracted few followers. But the king struck them down ruthlessly. And, although the plot was the work of a small group, the Exclusionists as a whole were tainted by their treason. One Whig lord committed suicide in the Tower, two were publicly beheaded and most of the rest, including Shaftesbury and Monmouth, fled into exile in the Netherlands. There Shaftesbury died. But his secretary and intellectual factotum, John Locke, who had devised the operation for the insertion of the tube and tap into his master, continued writing and working in the congenial atmosphere of Dutch tolerance and freedom, completing his great work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Meanwhile, England witnessed a Tory triumph, which, like the French absolutism it so much resembled, expressed itself in soaring stone and brick. The statue of Charles I – the Tories’ martyred hero – was re-erected in London; at Winchester, a huge new palace, destined to be the English Versailles, was being rushed to completion; and, above all, the huge bulk of St Paul’s was rising over the City of London as the noblest, most eloquent and most crushing symbol of an Anglican absolutism.
If St Paul’s was the symbol of the Tory triumph, its intellectual centre was Oxford. And it was there that, in Convocation on 21 July 1683, the University of Oxford issued a solemn declaration ‘against certain pernicious books and their damnable doctrines’. It is an Anglican syllabus of errors, in which all the doctrines of Whiggism and their authors are condemned as ‘false, seditious and impious, and most of them … also heretical and blasphemous’. Instead, the university proclaimed that Toryism was an eternal verity and the duty of ‘submission and obedience [to kings] to be absolute, and without exception’.
In other words, Anglicanism and royalism were one, as they had been from the beginning under Henry VIII and right through the Civil War.
But what would happen if the King ceased to be Anglican?
England would soon find out. For on 6 February 1685 Charles II died, having converted at last to Catholicism in his very final moments, and was succeeded without a struggle by the proudly Catholic James. The result would test the relationship of Church and state to destruction and send a Stuart on his travels once more.