44

Noise rhymes to noise

When James arrived at his brother’s sickroom in Windsor Castle he fell to his knees, and it is reported that the two men burst into tears. The king had recovered some of his strength and was already out of danger. Yet the two claimants to the throne, the dukes of York and Monmouth, were now in confrontation; each had his own band of supporters, but James for the moment had the upper hand. His sudden return to England had not caused an insurrection, as some had feared, and he had indeed been received with deference; the lord mayor and the aldermen of London, for example, had come to kiss his hand. He did not wish to return to exile in Brussels, and seems to have made it clear that he would leave England only if the duke of Monmouth also made his exit. It was agreed therefore that Monmouth would retire into Holland, out of harm’s way, while James would be dispatched to Edinburgh as a kind of viceroy. He remained there for almost three years.

It had already become clear that, in the election of the summer, the Whigs had won the majority and that those who had voted against the ‘exclusion’ of James were generally turned out of office. Charles refused to allow this parliament to sit, however, and prorogued it to the beginning of the following year, 1680. He told his nephew, William of Orange, that he had no choice in the matter and that otherwise ‘they would have his crown’; he also feared that the Commons would proceed to the impeachment of his brother and his wife for their Catholic beliefs. Few expected parliament to meet again.

Shaftesbury was discharged from his office as lord president of the new council, and at once entered his true role as leader of the opposition to the court and Crown. Yet he knew well enough that he had no real power unless or until parliament was assembled. The Commons was his praetorian guard. Almost at once, therefore, he planned to launch petitions from all parts of the country for its return. His organization was such that his agents, together with notable local men, went from parish to parish collecting marks and signatures. No one, not even the poorest, was overlooked.

On 17 November the Green Ribbon Club, opposed to Catholics and to the court, organized a great pageant in London in which it was claimed that 200,000 people took part. A variety of Catholic personages were in representation dragged through the streets, and the procession eventually halted in Fleet Street just by the King’s Arms, the headquarters of the club; here effigies of the pope and of the devil, as well as sundry monks, nuns and Jesuits, were hurled into the flames of a fire accompanied by a great shout that, according to a pamphlet, ‘London’s Defiance to Rome’, reached France and Rome ‘damping them all with a dreadful astonishment’. Macaulay remarks in his History of England that two words became current at this time, ‘mob’ and ‘sham’.

When the duke of Monmouth arrived in London unexpectedly from exile, he was greeted with bonfires and jubilant crowds as the natural Protestant successor to the throne; he was not so warmly received by his father, however, who told him to be gone from court. His son disobeyed on the grounds that he must stay in order to preserve the life of his father from the designs of the papists.

At the beginning of December 1679, with a party of fifteen other peers, Shaftesbury stopped Charles on his way to the royal chapel and presented him with a petition for the sitting of parliament. The king was so irate that he prorogued the assembly for a further eleven months and issued a proclamation against petitioning itself. His supporters were said to ‘abhor’ the conduct of those who were trying to force the king’s hand; for a while grew up the factions of ‘the Abhorrers’ and ‘the Petitioners’.

After some months of impasse Shaftesbury once more raised the temperature when in the early summer of 1680 he tried to present, to a Middlesex grand jury, the duke of York as a papist and the duchess of Portsmouth, Charles’s mistress, as a prostitute. The latter had already attracted the dislike and suspicion of many, and it had often been suggested that she should be sent packing to France as soon as possible. Shaftesbury’s action was of course an open affront to the king, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion. The king hastened to London from Windsor where he instructed the chief justice, William Scroggs, to dismiss the grand jury before it heard any evidence for the charges. The damage had been done, however, compounded by the fact that Shaftesbury received no rebuke.

When parliament finally met, towards the end of October, the Commons was full from the very first session. The king’s ministers, known as ‘the chits’ because of their relative youth, had formulated what they hoped was a consistent policy; they intended to defuse the threat of exclusion by imposing limitations on the power of a future King James, and to seek an alliance with the United Provinces against the French. It was still important to signal hostility to Louis XIV, even though Charles had been engaged in constant negotiations to obtain money from him.

The Whigs were not to be averted from their purpose, however, and at the beginning of November a second Exclusion Bill against the duke of York was introduced. It received its third reading within nine days and was then sent up to the Lords. The duke of Monmouth came back to London from a triumphal tour of the West Country in order to participate in the discussions.

The king also attended this long session of the peers, from eleven in the morning to nine at night, and listened to them with eager attention. It had been believed that he would abandon his brother, however reluctantly, for the sake of public peace; he was known to fear, more than anything else, the outbreak of another civil war. But in fact he remained firm and made his feelings known during the course of the Lords’ debate. When Monmouth expressed his concern for his father, Charles called out, ‘It is a Judas kiss that he gives me!’ The sentiments of the king may have helped to concentrate the minds of the Lords. They voted, sixty-three to thirty, against the Exclusion Bill. Shaftesbury’s measure had failed.

It was hoped that the Commons might now suggest a compromise upon which both sides might agree, but no possibility of a middle way existed. The Commons passed a series of resolutions aimed at the exclusion of the duke of York; they stated that no supply of money could be voted under the circumstances, that the councillors of the king should be removed from public employment, and that any man who lent money to the king should be called to the bar of parliament. The king was advised to prorogue parliament once again and the Commons, speedily warned of this threat, met early on the morning of 10 January 1681, to vote that anyone who offered such advice was a traitor to the king and to the realm. The king therefore issued a proclamation dissolving parliament, and ordering that a new assembly should meet in Oxford within two months.

This aroused anger, resentment and no little anxiety among Shaftesbury and his followers. Oxford was known to be the most royalist of all English cities. They would have been even more concerned if they had learned that Louis XIV had proffered another bribe to the king. Louis offered to grant him an annual pension, larger than anything parliament would provide, as long as he refrained from joining in any attack upon France by Spain or others. A ban on French imports was also allowed to expire. Nothing was put in writing, and no signatures were required; it was simply a verbal agreement, mediated by envoys, between the two kings.

The new parliament, meeting on 21 March 1681, was no more willing than its predecessor to come to any agreement. Charles appeared before the two houses with a compromise. If James ever became king, his powers would be transferred to a regent. In the first instance that regent would be James’s older daughter, Mary, princess of Orange, a Protestant; and, in the event of her decease, the regency would devolve upon his other Protestant daughter, Anne. This seemed on the face of it an eminently sensible arrangement, but the Commons refused to accept it. Instead it debated a third Exclusion Bill. Charles in fact seems genuinely to have wished for an agreement in the calmer atmosphere of Oxford, no less for the fact that he feared another civil war. That was another reason for his secret alliance with the French king; he might need men as well as money.

On 28 March, Charles, with his full regalia concealed in a covered sedan chair, proceeded to the Lords, who were sitting in the Geometry School of Oxford. He was about to spring a surprise. He appeared before the Lords in his ordinary clothes, but then he ordered his attendants to dress him in robe and crown. Thus attired he summoned the Commons. ‘My lords and gentlemen,’ he said to the two houses, ‘all the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end, when the divisions at the beginning are such: therefore, my lord chancellor, do as I have commanded you.’ He now told his opponents, to their faces, that they had been dissolved and must disperse. He left Oxford immediately, and they had no choice but to follow. It was reported that ‘the king’s breath scattered them like leaves in autumn’.

Charles now believed that he could survive without any parliamentary funds. His pension from France, and the raising of customs revenue from luxury French imports now freely admitted, would grant him room to manoeuvre; his household expenditure had in any case been considerably reduced. He had decided to embark upon a period of personal rule without an opposition to divert or trouble him. In this respect the king was greatly assisted by what seemed to be a resurgence of loyalty towards the Stuart monarchy. The intransigence of Shaftesbury and his followers, in rejecting what seemed to be a just and sensible offer on the matter of the regency, could be contrasted with the moderation of the king. They had wanted to bully him into submission, but he had remained firm. He had resisted any attempt to alter the natural succession because it was repugnant to his conscience and to the laws of England. That is how the abortive Oxford parliament could be represented.

In his declaration ‘to all his loving subjects, touching the causes and reasons that moved him to dissolve the last two parliaments’ he stated that ‘we assure ourself that we shall be assisted by the loyalty’ of those ‘who consider the rise and progress of the late troubles’. The ‘late troubles’ were the divisions that had led to the civil wars. ‘And we cannot but remember that religion, liberty and property were all lost and gone when monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that was restored.’ He appealed, therefore, to the instincts of loyalty and stability that maintained the traditions of the nation.

He now turned his fury upon Shaftesbury and his allies who, with no likelihood of a parliament, began to lose strength as well as purpose. Charles was determined to exclude them from all public offices; he decided to remove them from the judicial bench and from the administration of the towns. Sixty members of parliament who had voted for exclusion were removed from nomination as justices of the peace. Some of the lords-lieutenant of the counties were dismissed, together with the lowlier recorders and town clerks. Since the nonconformists had played a large role in the opposition, the laws against dissenters were executed with more rigour; they, rather than Roman Catholics, were increasingly consigned to prison. One contemporary said that it was a form of civil war, with the law replacing the sword.

At the beginning of July 1681 Shaftesbury was taken into custody and brought before the king and council where he was accused of treason; the earl denied the charge but was in any case committed to the Tower. Yet there was a flaw in the royal project. Shaftesbury had a residence at Aldersgate, and so his case came within the jurisdiction of the City. London was still in the hands of those who opposed the court; it was still, for the king, enemy territory.

When the earl’s case was heard in the Old Bailey, therefore, the grand jury was packed with prominent Whigs; the foreman had in fact been an exclusionist member of parliament. It was perhaps inevitable that a verdict of ignoramus – ‘we do not know’ – was given and Shaftesbury acquitted. Four days later he applied for bail and the king’s son, the duke of Monmouth, offered to act as his surety. He was released and, that night, the streets rang out with the cries ‘A Monmouth! A Shaftesbury!’ In many places, however, a Whig demonstration was countermanded by a Tory manifestation; or, as Sir Roger L’Estrange put it in his Observator, ‘Noise rhymes to Noise, and Noise must be opposed to Noise’.

Two days after the verdict had been given the king launched an investigation into London’s charter, asking ‘quo warranto’ or by what warrant did the City enjoy the corporate privileges that it claimed; it was a protracted and expensive procedure, replete with formal and legal niceties, which could easily be turned against the City corporation. Any pretext could be found or concocted by the court lawyers to justify a forfeiture. It was easier and less expensive to ask for a new charter, but this in turn might give the king power to remove ‘disaffected’ members of the corporation. It was a device that Charles had already been using to great effect.

Even before the quo warranto proceedings had ended, the court party was exercising all its influence to elect Tory sheriffs and a Tory mayor. Various subterfuges were employed. The keepers of the alehouses and coffee-houses were told that their licences would be revoked if they did not vote for the Tory candidates; most of the Whig candidates were removed from the poll on the grounds that they were Quakers, or were non-residents, or had refused to take the oaths, or were in some other way ineligible. The campaign of trickery and intimidation was successful, and the Tory candidates were elected. On the following day Shaftesbury left his house in Aldersgate and went into hiding before taking ship to Holland. He knew now that, in any new trial for high treason, his opponents would be able to control the juries. The king would finally claim his head. He died in Amsterdam at the beginning of the next year. It was his belief that the souls of men and women entered the stars at the moment of death; the spirit of Shaftesbury would kindle, perhaps, a very fiery comet.

Some London radicals were now convinced that Charles intended to create an absolute monarchy, and began to plot among themselves to resist any such attempt. It was reported by government informers that preparations had been made for an uprising by city dissenters, who were apparently resolved to capture the king and force him to act against his brother. In November 1682, hundreds of ‘brisk boys’ in the East End rioted with the call ‘A Monmouth! A Monmouth!’ Before he left for the continent Shaftesbury had joined with the duke in discussing an armed uprising in the event of the king’s death.

All this plotting and planning concluded in what became known as the ‘Rye House Plot’. Certain discontented Whigs – among them William, Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney and the earl of Essex – seem to have laid plans to ambush and kill the king and his brother on their way back from the races at Newmarket. The assassins would assemble at a lonely farmstead known as Rye House in Hertfordshire, for the purpose of ‘lopping the two sparks’. The plot was betrayed by one of the minor conspirators, and in the early summer of 1683 the principal agents were arrested. Even as the trial of Russell proceeded, the news came that Essex had been found dead in the Tower with wounds about his throat. It was supposed that he had committed suicide, thus presuming guilt, but it is possible that he had been murdered to prove the reality of the plot against the royal brothers. It would provide a convenient opportunity for the king to destroy all of the prominent Whigs.

When Lord Russell’s family pleaded for him the king replied that ‘if I do not take his life he will soon have mine’. His beheading, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was badly managed by the public hangman, Jack Ketch, who later issued an apology. When Algernon Sidney was also sentenced to death by the axe, he made a passionate statement of his innocence. The chief justice, Judge Jeffreys, rose and rebuked him. ‘I pray God work in you a temper fit to go into the other world, for I see you are not fit for this.’

‘My lord, feel my pulse and see if I am disordered. I bless God, I never was in better temper than I am now.’

Russell, Essex and Sidney became known as the first Whig martyrs.

The duke of Monmouth had also been implicated in the plot, and an indictment been drawn up against him. Yet he submitted to his father and signed a confession that ‘he owned the late conspiracy’ but was innocent of any design against the life of his father. On the following day he withdrew the statement, for fear that he had betrayed his erstwhile associates; whereupon he was banished from the court. John Evelyn reported in his diary, the entry of 15 July 1683, that ‘the public was now in great consternation on the late plot and conspiracy; his Majesty very melancholy, and not stirring without double guards; all the avenues and private doors about Whitehall and the Park shut up, few admitted to walk in it’.

The news of the conspiracy helped to rouse further anger against Whigs and dissenters, and the king published a declaration against ‘the factious party’ that was read out from every pulpit. This provoked the publication of innumerable ‘loyal addresses’ that underlined the supremacy of the king. Charles had in effect won his battle against parliament. He was also about to conquer London. The quo warranto proceedings had come to a conclusion, and in the summer of 1683 the king’s bench decided that the liberties of the city had been rendered forfeit and returned into the hands of the king.

Charles could now govern in any manner that he pleased. The earl of Danby, once pursued by the Commons, was promptly released from the Tower. The duke of York was granted extensive powers, and it seemed to many that he was already ruling in place of the king who more and more consulted only his pleasures. In the spring of 1684, in fact, the duke was reappointed to the privy council after an absence of eleven years. In this period Titus Oates, the instigator of the ‘Popish Plot’, was arrested for calling James a traitor; he was convicted and fined £100,000. This ensured that he remained in confinement for the foreseeable future.

An entry from Evelyn’s diaries conveys the mood and atmosphere of the triumphant court with its ‘inexpressable luxury, and prophanesse, gaming and all dissolution, and as if it were total forgetfulness of God’. The king was ‘sitting and toying with his concubines’, among them the duchess of Portsmouth, with a ‘French boy singing love-songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least two thousand in gold before them’.

Yet the games of Charles II were about to end. In the early weeks of 1685 he suffered from prolonged attacks of gout which left him debilitated. On the morning of Monday 2 February, he arose early after a restless and fevered night; to his attendants he seemed lethargic and almost torpid. He was also confused in speech and action. Then he fell into convulsions, or as one of his doctors put it ‘convulsivi motus’, that left him speechless for two hours; cantharides, or Spanish fly, was applied to his skin to promote blisters. The letting of his blood lent him some relief, and the king recovered his power of speech. The duke of York had been summoned, and arrived so rapidly that he was wearing one shoe and one slipper. The doctors now prepared powders to promote sneezing so that the pressure of ‘the humours’ upon the king’s brain might be relieved; he was also given a solution of cowslip flowers and spirit of sal ammoniac.

The king gradually seemed to grow better but by Wednesday afternoon he was covered in a profuse cold sweat that was a stage in the progress of dissolution. A preparation known as ‘spirit of human skull’ was then applied. By noon on Thursday there was little hope; he suffered several fits but was conscious in the intervals between them.

On that Thursday evening he ended the vacillations of a lifetime and formally entered the Roman Catholic communion by the ministrations of a Benedictine monk, John Hudleston. When the bishops and other attendants had withdrawn, the monk was conducted to the death chamber by the duke of York through a secret door. There seems little reason to doubt this account. James wrote, and spoke, of it. Hudleston himself left a brief description of the event. The observers had indeed been excluded from the chamber for a period, and afterwards the king refused to receive Anglican communion.

After that rite his mind was clear and his speech composed. On the following morning he asked to be taken to a window where he might see the rising sun. By ten o’clock he was unconscious. He died, quietly and without pain, shortly before noon.