King James II possessed a characteristic which, although admirable in a commoner, could only bring disaster to a Catholic king who ruled a Protestant nation. He was incapable of sustaining the pretence that he believed what he did not believe. Public criticism about his commitment to Catholicism had, to a degree, been stifled by his marriage, in 1660, to Anne Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon and a Protestant. But her sudden death renewed anxieties which Samuel Pepys illustrated in a diary entry for February 1661. Pepys had welcomed the news (false, as it turned out) that Charles II was secretly married to ‘the neece of the Prince of Ligne and that he already had two sons by her’. That made it impossible that ‘the Duke of York and his family should come to the Crowne’ – a highly undesirable prospect, ‘he being a professed friend to the Catholiques’.1
In 1668, James married for a second time. His new wife was a Catholic – Mary Beatrice, daughter of the Duchess of Modena – and, according to Pepys, it was because of her that James began openly to observe the rituals of the Catholic Church. A few weeks after the second marriage the diarist noted that the Duke of York ‘and his lady’ had begun publicly to take part in the ‘silly devotions’2 required by Rome. It took four years for James completely to abandon the Church of England’s rites and rituals. In 1672 he failed, for the first time, to take Easter Communion with the rest of the formally Protestant royal family. In 1685 his succession was greeted with more apprehension than joy.
Suspicions that James would be an openly Catholic king were quickly confirmed. On the first Sunday of his reign he attended High Mass in the Queen’s chapel in St James’s and, on his instruction, the funeral of Charles II was conducted, in John Evelyn’s words, ‘very obscurely’.3 The secrecy led to the obvious assumption that Charles had been sent to meet his Maker with a Requiem Mass. The new King’s instructions about the Coronation Service were disturbingly explicit. Nothing was to be said, sung or done that was contrary to Catholic doctrine. In consequence, it was assumed that James had been anointed and crowned by his confessor on the previous night and that the public ceremony was not so much an act of dedication as a public show of respect for the throne he had inherited.
James’ first address to the Privy Council was, at its face value, a model of moderation. ‘I have often hithertofore ventured my life in defence of this nation and shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its just rights and liberties.’4 But to many members of the Council the endorsement of freedom and democracy sounded like the beginning of a process by which his co-religionists would gradually evolve from disadvantaged minority into a church militant that was big enough and bold enough to dominate English religious life. Catholics increased Protestant fears by responding to James’ promise of tolerance with an explosion of triumphant public enthusiasm, which was interpreted as the prologue to the Catholic monarch imposing his faith on a Protestant people. Catholic newspapers and broadsheets multiplied and began to argue both for the acceptance of Roman doctrine and against the acceptance of Anglican clergy as genuine priests. Great families who had employed priests to celebrate Mass in secrecy opened their private chapels for public worship. In Baswick in Staffordshire, the Fowlers decorated their chapel with pictures of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Thomas Aquinas and St Peter and Mary Magdalen and Sts Monica, Dominic and Thomas à Becket. They also bought a cope and mitre, as well as vestments for each stage of the liturgical cycle, so that they were prepared to welcome any priest or bishop who paid them a visit on any Sunday of the year.5 No doubt they hoped to welcome John Leyburn, who was appointed Vicar Apostolic of England and Titular Bishop of Hadrumetum in the year of James’ succession.
The last Marian English bishop, Thomas Goldwell of St Asaph, had died in exile in 1585. Cardinal William Allen, the founder of the English Colleges in Douai and Rome, had possessed the title of Prefect of the English Mission, but was never able to visit England. From then on there had been a series of appointments which – for reasons ranging from bombastic temperament to poor health – had done little to further the Catholic cause. James’ succession and John Leyburn’s appointment made Catholics believe that God had not forgotten England.
Leyburn was, by background and instinct, a scholar – first a student in, and then the Principal of, the English College at Douai. Much of his first year in England was occupied by a tour of the north and Midlands, during which he baptised countless converts, administered the sacrament to men and women who had not received it in years and confirmed 20,857 Catholics – including 422 in Stafford, 499 in Edgbaston and 360 in Newcastle.6 In a single month he solidified the support Rome had always enjoyed in Lancashire with the mission that confirmed 1,143 men and women in Preston, 1,182 in Tulketh and 1,252 in Wigan.7 Leyburn’s strength was the belief that the tasks of making new Catholics and sustaining old ones could be combined. In 1687, his pastoral letter to the Catholics of England included the usual exhortations to the clergy ‘to labour in more than the ordinary measure’ and to the gentry ‘to enlarge their charity’. But it ended with an elegantly expressed admission of the limited status of the Catholic Church in England. ‘Being fallen into other hands than those [it was] intended for [it was] reduced unto its prime [original] condition and accordingly may, by the rules of justice as well as piety, require to be maintained after the prime method.’8 And it seems that his admission of the English Catholic Church’s limited status – and its consequent duty to proselytise – was endorsed by King James. Leyburn had served in Rome as secretary to the Dominican Cardinal Philip Howard who, in 1679, had been made (absentee) Protector of England. But, when the time came to revive the role of resident Vicar Apostolic, the King had interceded with the Pope and, with Howard’s self-sacrificial agreement, secured the appointment of John Leyburn.
Leyburn’s arrival did not mark the absolute end of the parochial, rather than missionary, approach to the work of the English Catholic Church. An Association of Staffordshire Clergy – deeply suspicious of regulars in general, and Jesuits in particular – attempted to revive and perpetuate practices that were universally accepted when England was a Catholic country. Priests were to say no more than two Masses a day and provide pastoral care as well as perform their offices and grant absolution. To emphasise the parochial obligation, the Association required that once a month a pastoral message be ‘read to our flocks … so that every penitent may know its own pastor and call on him when need requires’. Nor was a priest ‘to depart any considerable distance out of the county’.9 But the Staffordshire clergy were standing in the path of history – and probably in conflict with the view of its Catholic king. James certainly looked favourably upon the Jesuits and probably accepted that his Church was destined to remain a minority in his lifetime.
Whatever view they held of England’s Catholic future, the relaxation of hostility towards their teaching made it possible for both regular and secular priests to perform their ministry with a confidence they had not previously enjoyed. They were also helped, in or about 1688, by the open publication of a new version of the catechism, the main instrument of Catholic teaching. Earlier versions had been either wordy and old-fashioned or large, complex and expensive. So the Abstract, prepared by John Gother ‘for the use of Children and ignorant people’, was particularly welcome. Gother’s concern for the humble and meek was not in doubt. He had offended rich Catholics by accusing them of overworking their servants on the nights before feast days, in order to recoup time lost to labour on the holiday. And he was a severe critic of the casual irreverent attitude displayed towards the sacraments by the gentry. Some took Communion ‘in such a disrespectful undress as would be an affront to the meanest Friend’. Their conduct could ‘be called nothing less than stepping out of bed to the Altar’.10 Others ‘approached the Holy Table, powdered, perfumed, bare-necked or any other way set forth as seems suitable for the ball’.
John Gother also attempted to popularise ideas about the Christian vocation which echoed the Protestant ethic of redemption through hard work. His Instructions for Particular States and Conditions of Life asserted that ‘He has expressly commanded that they shall eat their Bread by the Sweat of their Brows’ – a slight misquotation of Genesis 3:19. He held the, slightly heretical, view that greater stress should be placed on redemption by grace and faith. Even more controversial were his reservations about the merits of monastic life. His ideal priests worked among the people. ‘If, in Submission to this Command, they undertake their Work, it is certain that their daily lives will be as much an Act of Religion and Obedience, as what those do who live in a Cloyster.’11
Reservations about the virtue of rejecting the wicked world complemented – some would say compounded – Gother’s rigorous view of the priest’s obligations. It was the clergy’s duty to protect their followers from the sins that surrounded them by ‘drawing upon himself the difficulties, calumnies and insults of men by those undoubted truths of which it is his duty to speak’.12 All in all, Gother appears to be one of the most attractive characters in the sombre drama of late-seventeenth century religion. But his importance lay not in his personality, but in his advocacy that the secular clergy accept a missionary role, side by side with their regular brothers. He had not given up hope of England’s redemption. Like other plans for reform and reorganisation, all Gother’s initiative was overshadowed by the controversy that diverted attention from all other religious issues – the Catholic king’s relations with his Protestant Parliament.
It seems unlikely that King James spent much time considering the form that English Catholicism should take. He simply wanted to do the most he could, and the best possible to promote a faith to which he subscribed long before his accession to the throne, and there is nothing to suggest that he ever even contemplated the creation of a continental-style theocratic despotism. But the spectre of an absolute monarchy haunted England. And in 1685 – the year of his accession – France provided a terrible example of the tyranny that English Protestants feared. Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed freedom of worship to his Huguenot subjects. About 1,500 of their leaders were made galley slaves. ‘Popery and slavery, like to sisters, go hand in hand,’ wrote the Earl of Shaftesbury.13 Perhaps as many as 80,000 Huguenots fled to England, bringing with them their skills and horror stories of life under a Catholic despot.
The fear of Catholic tyranny was felt even in James’ own family. James’ only surviving son had died in 1671. So Mary and Anne – daughters by his first marriage, who had been brought up as Protestants – were inevitably drawn into the arguments about the succession. Mary was thought to be irrevocably Protestant. In 1677, she had married – on Charles II’s initiative – William Prince of Orange, and life in the Netherlands had confirmed the principles of faith and authority that she had been taught as a girl. But there was a good deal of loose talk about Anne being converted to Catholicism and being named as James’ successor.
Paul Barrillon, the French Ambassador, speculated about the possibility, but wisely concluded that the idea was ‘chimerical and impracticable’,14 and a visitor from Versailles asked the Danish envoy in London – probably on his own initiative – if Prince George of Denmark would be agreeable to Anne, his wife, converting to Catholicism. Surprisingly, Prince George sent a reply: Anne had already begun to take instruction. The answer was a lie – no doubt prompted by George’s desire to share the crown of England. His hopes were dashed by his father-in-law who, on being urged by the Pope to lead his daughter to Rome, replied that she had been ‘brought up by people who inspired in her a great aversion to the Catholic Church and had a very stubborn nature’. He added, by way of substantiating his assessment of her wilful character, that – with the deliberate intention of demonstrating her dissent – she carried on conversation with her neighbour at table while the priest was saying grace. He might have added that if Anne showed the slightest sympathy for Catholics or Catholicism, Mary always reminded her of her Protestant duty to protect England from the fate which had befallen the Huguenots.
On the day that his brother died, James told the Privy Council that he relied, in all that he did, on the loyalty of the Church of England. His misplaced confidence, like his abiding fear of a rebellion that would end with his exile, was the product of his father’s reign and death, and it caused him to act in a way which he should have realised was certain to antagonise men whom he needed to be his friends. Sometimes his insensitive impetuosity was justified by the reckless espousal of noble causes. Within a month of his succession he had told the Privy Council of his emollient intentions and gone on to instruct judges, on his own authority, to release from gaol all ‘Popish priests’, recusants who refused to attend Church of England services and would not (or could not) pay the prohibitive £20 a month fine which their refusal incurred; and, more worrying to men and women who were fearful of a Catholic coup d’état, prisoners who had been convicted of refusing to swear the Oaths of Allegiance and Royal Supremacy. There were many prosperous and powerful Catholics who feared that James’ enthusiasm for the complete abolition of the penal laws could have only one result: an end to the partial and selective tolerance which they already enjoyed.
Their fears proved to be justified. In March 1686, Sir James Reresby, a Protestant, described how James had promoted the interests of the Catholic Church in the first year of his reign. He lacked either the power or the will to impose on Parliament the repeal of the punitive legislation. So, said Sir James, he gave all the ‘encouragement he could to the increase of his own [Church] by putting more Papists into office here [but especially in Ireland]’.15 That – as the King was foolish enough to admit – was a calculated first step towards his ultimate goal. In May 1686 he told the Papal Nuncio that the repeal of the penal legislation would ensure that ‘two years later, England would become a Catholic country’.16 That was exactly what the Protestants feared.
The idea of the, inevitably gradual, creation of a Catholic state was not universally popular among Catholics. Aristocrats among the laity sought to retain the ascendancy over the priesthood which had been achieved during the years of Elizabethan persecution when Mass was most frequently said in safe houses. The revival of a clerical establishment threatened their supremacy. And James’ plans – whether they succeeded or not – were a prescription for an upheaval. The rich were already left to worship in peace. They saw no reason to jeopardise their comfortable condition. For the next three hundred years the drive towards emancipation was regularly held back, and sometimes even temporarily halted, by Catholics who were fearful of moving too fast. Usually they were persons of privilege whose souls were secured by arrangements which frustrated the punitive and proscriptive laws.
James continued to pluck ideas out of the air. In May 1686 he had written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York ordering them to instruct all the clergy in their archdiocese not to engage in the dissemination of ‘abstruse and speculative notions’17 about theological matters – effrontery that was made more acceptable to Catholicism’s bitter enemies by the additional instruction that they were also to remind the clergy of their duty to read the (quintessentially Protestant) Thirty-Nine Articles twice a year. The Primates obliged, but – inevitably – their injunction was resented to the point of disobedience by some of the clergy. Dr James Sharp was almost certainly not the first transgressor. But because he was Dean of Norwich and Rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields, his sermon – warning Protestants of the folly of sympathising with Catholics and Catholicism – could not be ignored. Proof that rebellion is contagious was provided by the Reverend George Tully – Sub-Dean of York and Canon of Ripon – who, shortly after Dr Sharp’s outburst, was reported to have preached a similar sermon. James wrote to Henry Compton, the Bishop of London, ordering him to suspend Sharp for the expression of opinions that were ‘unbecoming reflections and improper expressions calculated to beget evil opinion of the king and thereby encourage disobedience, schism and rebellion’. Compton refused.
James reacted by creating an Ecclesiastical Commission with authority over both the Anglican Church and the universities. Its membership included the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord President of the Council and the Lord Treasurer, as well as three carefully chosen bishops. The Commission’s first act was the suspension of the Bishop of London. Henry Compton had agreed, on reflection, to reprove, though not suspend, Sharp. It was a provocative act which compounded the Commission’s provocative creation. King James, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, was undoubtedly within his rights to create the Commission. But its mere existence offended the Church and alienated many members of its clergy who, otherwise, would have been loyal to the King. And, because it existed, the temptation to find it work to do was irresistible. The work usually served only to make James more enemies. The Commission became the instrument by which James – following the step-by-step policy that Sir John Reresby had described – attempted to impose his Catholicism on the universities.
There is no way of knowing if James would have survived as a Catholic king had he avoided the self-inflicted damage to his reputation. The King’s conduct raised questions about his judgement and (far more important) his integrity, which dissipated whatever goodwill he had initially enjoyed. During the heady early days of his reign it had seemed that Providence, and perhaps even the English people, were on his side. A hundred or so of the 513 Members of the new Parliament had been elected for the first time. ‘Exclusionists’ – who would have barred James’ path to the throne – were in a minority. Even had the House of Commons chosen to ‘refuse supply’ – the way in which it had imposed its will on James’ father and brother – the new King could have ruled, at least for a time, without the provision of extra funds. And it was ten days before Parliament assembled that Titus Oates was convicted of perjury, defrocked and, so that his perfidy be made public, ordered to be whipped through the streets from Newgate to Tyburn. The first whipping took place on the opening day of the new session. Proof that the Popish Plot had been an invention was expected to ease the King’s troubled relationship with Parliament and ensure that he was secure on the throne.
James did not remain untroubled and apparently secure for long. On June 11th 1685, the Duke of Monmouth – Charles II’s illegitimate son – landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset and asserted his claim to the throne. The 4,000 followers he attracted were mostly Protestant Dissenters. So his rebellion took on the form of a holy war. After capturing Taunton, Monmouth was defeated by royalist troops at the Battle of Sedgemoor. The prisoners were treated with unrestrained savagery – atrocities for which history has blamed Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys, who presided at what came to be called ‘the bloody assizes’. But King James was at least complicit. Most of the rebels were transported as indentured labour to the West Indies. On his personal instructions, any man among them who refused to acknowledge James’ right to rule had an ear cut off.
The experience – behaving as his detractors had always feared that he would – bolstered James’ self-confidence. The Marquess of Halifax – Lord President of the Council, but never one of the King’s favourites – was asked his opinion of the Test Acts, passed in the reign of Charles II. The King left no doubt about what answer he wanted. Before Halifax could respond, he was warned that James ‘would be served by none but those that would be for repeal of the Tests’.18 Nevertheless Halifax replied that he believed the law should remain unchanged, ‘since the nation trusted so much to them that public quiet was largely maintained by that means’. He was dismissed and replaced by the Earl of Sutherland, not yet a Catholic, but an open sympathiser. His appointment had been urged upon the King by Father Edward Petre, a Jesuit who had supervised the education of James’ illegitimate children. In the years that lay ahead, Father Petre was to become a source of regular advice to the King and of continual of irritation to those who surrounded the throne.
Father Edward Petre might have been invented to provide Protestants with spine-chilling stories about Rome’s designs on England. He was a member of one of England’s noble Catholic families and of England’s least popular and most feared religious Order – the Society of Jesus. His close relationship with the King was, in consequence, interpreted as a declaration of the King’s militant Catholicism. On the day of his accession James made Petre a priest at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace and soon thereafter petitioned the Pope first to make Petre a bishop and then to create him cardinal. Both petitions were rejected. James proposed to soften the blow of the papal snub by making Petre a member of the Privy Council. Petre declined on the grounds that his admission to Court would be wildly unpopular in the country. A second offer was accepted in the belief that the passage of time had made his elevation more acceptable.
He was wrong. His conduct was not even acceptable to John Keynes, the Jesuit provincial, who was – unusually for members of his Order – following the instructions of a pastoral letter from the Vicar Apostolic and assisting in the setting up of a network of churches and schools – a more worthy occupation, in his view, than hearing the confessions of royalty. Had it been widely known that letters from Petre had been submitted in evidence at Popish Plot trials – only to be judged inadmissible because they did not relate to that day’s defendant – his position at Court would have been unsustainable. Petre maintained his influence, and retained the support of the notoriously fickle James, by warning the King against invented enemies. Each Friday night he held a camarilla (caucus) which intrigued against supposed conspirators.
It is doubtful if Petre did any major damage, though he disrupted the smooth working of the Court and Privy Council by persuading some of the King’s least perceptive advisers to work through him. His position on the great issues of the day – the speed at which the penal legislation could be repealed, and the King’s relationship with the Pope – was largely determined by John Warner, a more substantial fellow Jesuit who, on Petre’s recommendation, became James’ confessor. But royal favourites always irritate the Court, especially when there is no obvious reason for their status. Edward Petre was probably favoured because of the care he had taken during the time when he was tutor to James’ illegitimate children. He became a potent symbol of the King’s lack of judgement – a characteristic that defined the reign.
James associated all Puritans with the forces which had deposed and executed his father. So he was reluctant to extend the freedom of worship to them. Ireland, he concluded, would accept the end of the Test Acts without complaint. And he believed – wrongly, as it turned out – that Scotland would bend more readily to his will than England. In James’ judgement, the relaxation of penal laws was best accomplished gradually in all his kingdoms. So, relying on his powers as Supreme Governor of the Church and the authority provided by the royal prerogative, he absolved army officers – as a first step – from the requirement to be practising members of the Protestant faith. His plan to extend freedom of worship to other professions and to public employees was interrupted by the intervention of the judges, led by William Jones, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, who denied the King’s right to change or overrule the law. James exercised his right to change the judiciary. The changes did not have the desired effect. Both the Attorney and Solicitor General refused to implement the King’s law. Someone (the idea was too convoluted for James’ not very subtle mind) had to find a way of changing the judicial mind. A test case was contrived.
Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic of no distinction, was made Governor of Dover, and Arthur Godden, his coachman, was instructed to sue his employer for unlawfully accepting public office, despite not taking the sacraments of the Church as required by the Test Act of 1673, notwithstanding the fact that the Act had been suspended by the King. The case was heard by a bench of carefully chosen judges who, to nobody’s surprise, found for Sir Edward on the grounds that the King possessed the power to change the law. The precedent having been established, James proceeded to act in accordance with its provision.
His decisions were as capricious as they were arbitrary. Four Roman Catholic peers were appointed members of the Privy Council and preparations were made to absolve them from the obligation to swear loyalty to the Church of England. The Earl of Castlemaine, a Roman Catholic, was made James’ representative in the Vatican. Ferdinand, Count d’Adda, who arrived in England during November 1685 as the Pope’s unofficial envoy, received such a warm welcome that, six months later, he was promoted Archbishop of Amasia in partibus infidelium (in heretical countries). His elevation was celebrated in the Chapel Royal, where James knelt at his feet. Within the year he was welcomed at Windsor as official Papal Nuncio. The Duke of Somerset, Lord of the Bedchamber in Waiting, refused to conduct the visitor to the presence chamber on the grounds that it was illegal for him, if not the sovereign, to do business with Papists. James, in the euphoria of the moment, overlooked the insubordination. Catholics were appointed, on the King’s initiative, to key positions in the University of Oxford. Obadiah Walker was made Master of University College and was told that he could use whichever room he chose for the exclusive practice of his devotions. John Massey was promoted Dean of Christ Church and was freed from the obligation to attend Church of England services.
James’ policy in Ireland was the same mixture of caution and the sudden exercise of arbitrary power in support of individual Catholics and the increase of Catholic influence. His first appointment as Lord Lieutenant was the Protestant Earl of Clarendon. Less than a year after he took office, Clarendon questioned the right of the Earl of Tyrconnell – Commander-in-Chief in Ireland – to remove all Protestant officers from one regiment under his command. Tyrconnell complained to the King, who (encouraged by Archbishop Russell of Dublin) made him Lord Lieutenant in Clarendon’s place. Clarendon wrote in his diary, with ironic understatement, ‘Sometimes I think it may be possible that the king may have altered his measures so as to bring Roman Catholics into his employment.’19 He might have added that James should have known that the recruitment of Catholic army officers enabled his enemies to claim that he was planning to impose his religion on the country by military force. If James did realise the dangers of the path he followed, he still saw no reason to change route. He proposed to appoint the Catholic Earl of Carlingford Commander-in-Chief of English troops in the Netherlands, but William, Prince of Orange – James’ son-in-law, nephew and husband of the heir presumptive – rejected the proposal. It was an unheeded warning of trouble that lay ahead.
Before he became King, James had been confident that he could rely on the Prince of Orange and at the beginning of his reign he had written to his son-in-law in language which made clear that he certainly wanted his sympathy and might, one day, need his help. ‘As for things here, they do not mend but every day grow worse … All things look as they did at the beginning of the rebellion.’20 But by 1687 William gratuitously condemned James’ determination to repeal the Test Acts. Caspar Fagel, Holland’s First Minister, published an open letter which explained that William and Mary ‘freely consented to covering of papists from the severities of the laws against them on account of their religion and also that they might have free exercise of it in private … But they could not consent to the repeal of those laws that tended only to the security of the Protestant religion.’21 The importance of the pronouncement was that it represented the view of the heir presumptive to the throne of England.
William, prematurely concerned with the laws of the land that his wife expected to rule, sent Everard van Dykvelt as Ambassador Extraordinary to London with the task of encouraging support for the continuation of the Test Acts. James, not unreasonably, refused to see him, but instructed his temporary friend, John Churchill, to remind the Dutchman that, despite there being no penal laws in the Netherlands, Protestantism remained secure in Holland. It was a good debating point. But it did not reduce the damage done by Prince William’s categorical rejection of repeal or his confidence that, one day, he would be in a position to determine the laws of England. Van Dykvelt took home a message that, in 1688, gave William confidence that his coup would succeed. The Princess Anne, the Ambassador reported, ‘was resolved by the assistance of God to suffer all extremities, even death itself, rather than be brought to change her religion’.22 The next in line to the throne after Mary would not stand in the way of a Protestant revolt. All that was needed to set it in train was more provocation. James could be relied upon to provide it.
Part of the pressure on James came from the knowledge that piecemeal promotion of Catholic interests usually served to antagonise Protestant opinion without satisfying Catholic aspirations. Nowhere was that more true than in Ireland, where the King – wanting to maintain English domination – maintained the land settlement which was the economic manifestation of the Reformation. Charles Kelly, High Sheriff of County Roscommon, spoke for the whole Irish peasantry when he complained that by ‘failing to restore their estates’ James had flouted ‘the hereditary rights of the [Catholic] natives’.23 Land hunger and Catholic suppression remained inseparable and related grievances in seventeenth-century Ireland and were to remain so for two hundred years.
Catholic hopes in Scotland had inevitably been over-excited by the accession of James VII to the throne that had been occupied – some people would argue with more grace than distinction – by Mary, Queen of Scots, his great-grandmother. However, the new King gave them the uncharacteristic (and dispiriting) advice that they should ‘do their business quietly at the beginning otherwise they may undo all’.24 No doubt they were relieved to discover that James’ idea of quiet calm included an order that all Scottish priests abroad must return home and prepare for the reconversion of their native land. To facilitate that process, in May 1686 he had asked the Scottish Parliament to repeal the laws which penalised his ‘innocent subjects, those of the Roman Catholic religion’.25 Reluctant to rely on Scottish tolerance alone, he offered, in return, the inducement of free trade with England and the promise to guarantee the rights of the Kirk in law. The Scots agreed – but only if the King further enhanced the status of the Protestant religion by making the Kirk the established Church in Scotland by law. Displeased by the reception of his proposal, the King prorogued Parliament, opened the Chapel Royal in Holyrood House for Catholic worship, established a Jesuit school in the same palace and instructed the Scottish Privy Council to rescind the penal laws. The Privy Council refused and was replaced with Catholic members. In February 1687 – nine months after he had begun what he regarded as an exercise in reasonable compromise – he lost patience with even his highly attenuated form of due process and, using the powers that the courts had ruled were vested in him, acted alone.
On February 12th 1687, James issued his Declaration of Indulgence to Tender Consciences in Scotland. Seven weeks later he published an identical Declaration for England. Both proclamations promised ‘free exercise of their religion for Roman Catholics and of our indulgence to Dissenters’, though they still prohibited ‘field conventicles’; for some reason James – like his grandfather – feared that open-air services would encourage subversion. Although the ‘indulgences’ were granted under the royal prerogative, James claimed ‘to have no doubt of the concurrence of our two Houses of Parliament when we shall think it convenient for them to meet’. That was a lie. He had canvassed parliamentary opinion and found it overwhelmingly opposed to relaxation of the penal laws.
The most elegant argument employed in the furious debate which followed was advanced by the Marquess of Halifax in his Letter to a Dissenter upon Occasion of His Majesty’s late gracious Declaration of Indulgence. That polemic asserted that ‘The alliance between Liberty and Infallibility is bringing together the most contrary things that are in the world.’26 Within James’ own family, the objection to his policy was less philosophical. Anne had no doubt that the ‘desire to take off the Test [Act] and all other laws against Catholics is only a pretence to bring in Popery’27 and wrote to her sister, ‘I believe, in a little while no Protestant will be able to live here.’ As a result of what he regarded as his daughters’ disloyalty, the King forbade the sisters to correspond with each other.
James recalled that his father had twice drafted Declarations of Indulgence and twice been told by Parliament and the judges that, in doing so, he exceeded his powers. He did, however, undoubtedly possess the power to prorogue Parliament. So, following what had become a family tradition, he suspended sittings for eight months while he prepared the ground for what he intended to be the complete repeal of the Test Acts – ‘having been ever against persecuting any for conscience sake’.28 Protestants were offered the reassurance that members of the Church of England would be ‘free to exercise their religion as by the law established’, but the Declaration ended with an assertion which was necessary both to salve the King’s conscience and to confirm the sincerity of the whole Declaration. ‘We cannot but heartily wish, as will easily be believed, that all people of our dominions were members of the Catholic Church.’
The Declaration was greeted with an orgy of gratitude – some spontaneous and some (including the responses of half a dozen Church of England bishops) contrived. The chorus of counterfeit support grew so loud that an unknown satirist published The Humble Address of the Atheists, or sects of Epicureans. It congratulated the King on freeing ‘the nation from the troublesome Bygottries of Religion’ and encouraging ‘men to conclude that there is nothing sacred and Divine but Trade and Empire’.29 There were, however, dissenting voices. Among them were the shrill tones of Princess Anne: ‘In taking away the Test and penal laws they have taken away our religion and if that be done, farewell to all happiness for once the Papists have everything in their hands, all we poor Protestants have but a dismal time to hope for.’30 And Anne was as passionately opposed to freedom for Dissenters as she was against the toleration of Catholicism. ‘It is a melancholy prospect that we of the Church of England have. Everyone has the free exercise of their religion – on purpose, no doubt, to ruin us.’
Despite his assertion of confidence in the libertarian instincts of his legislators, James remained reluctant to put his judgement to the test. So, instead of recalling Parliament, he pursued his policy of promoting the Catholic cause in whatever way his sovereign powers allowed. On the day of his Declaration of Indulgence he instructed the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, to fill the vacancy – caused by the death of the President – by electing Anthony Farmer, a Roman Catholic. Farmer, an alcoholic libertine, was unacceptable to the college. The Fellows ignored the King’s instruction and elected, as President, John Hough, already a Fellow of Magdalen. Hough was confirmed in his office by the Bishop of Winchester, the College Visitor. He took the oaths which, thanks to the Declaration of Indulgence, were no longer obligatory and was installed as President. James referred the election to his Ecclesiastical Commission. It declared the election of John Hough invalid and, on James’ instruction, appointed Samuel Parker, the Bishop of Oxford (thought to be a secret Catholic), in his place. The Fellows refused to accept him as they had refused to accept Anthony Farmer.
James played for time. He decided to make ‘a progress’ through the Midlands and West Country in order to allow his loyal and grateful people to see his royal person. The journey was punctuated with assurances of his good intentions towards Protestant Dissenters, but it began and ended in controversy. After a brief visit to the south coast, he joined his wife at Bath, where she had taken the waters in the hope of encouraging conception, before moving on for the major part of the tour. On the eve of their departure, the royal couple attended a service in the abbey. Despite the presence of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the sermon was preached – according to the King’s wishes – by one of his Roman Catholic chaplains. On August 3rd the progress ended in Oxford.
The Fellows of Magdalen College were summoned to meet James in Christ Church, where they were reprimanded in the majestic language of a king betrayed. ‘Ye have been a stubborn turbulent college … Is this your Church of England loyalty? … Go home and show yourselves good members of the Church of England … I will be obeyed.’31 The Fellows politely refused to act in a way that violated the college statutes. They were dismissed and, in an act more vindictive than judicial, the Ecclesiastical Commission ordered that they should not receive any other Church appointment. Samuel Parker held precarious office for six months and then died. His successor was Bonaventure Giffard, who was to become Vicar Apostolic for London. He died, in office, at the age of ninety-one – probably unaware that Leyburn had advised the King that making him President of Magdalen was a recklessly provocative invitation to rebellion.
Not only did James fail to take Leyburn’s good advice about Oxford, but he determined to impose his Catholic will on Cambridge. He instructed the Vice Chancellor to admit a Benedictine monk to the degree of Master of Arts without taking the oath of loyalty and without possessing the necessary academic qualifications. The first concession was his to make. The second, as the Vice Chancellor told him, was not. The Ecclesiastical Commission was, once more, asked to adjudicate between the King and a disloyal subject. To nobody’s surprise, it found for the King, and the Vice Chancellor was removed from office. There is no reason to believe that James ever wanted to take over the universities and make them instruments of the Catholic Church. His instinct was to promote the interests of individual Catholics. When he was frustrated in that endeavour, a combination of vanity and inherited belief in the sovereign rights of kings made him use every power at his disposal to get his way. But to Oxford and Cambridge, he appeared to be a tyrant. His pointless acts of petty tyranny were to count heavily against him when England came seriously to consider the sort of monarch it wanted on the throne.
Mounting Protestant concern about the future of their Church was not matched by increasing confidence among the whole Catholic population. Its more prudent members feared that James was moving too fast towards their full emancipation for it to be accepted by what had become a clear majority opinion in favour of the Church of England. And the Catholic grandees who had felt that they owned their Church when, as a fugitive faith, it was practised more in the seclusion of great houses than in the parish churches, felt understandable – if impious – regret that their power was slipping away. But the Vatican realised that the time had come to establish some sort of organisation in a country which, by the time of James’ accession, was accepted in Rome as needing the framework of a missionary organisation. The result, in January 1688, was the division of England into four Apostolic regions – Northern, Midland, London and Western (which included Wales) – each with a Vicar of its own.
The four ‘bishops’ issued a joint pastoral letter, which told their several flocks: ‘now you are in Circumstances of letting it [their faith] appear abroad and of edifying your Neighbours by professing it publicly and living up to the Rules prescribed by it’.32 Leyburn – walking the streets of London ‘in a long cassock and cloak, with a golden cross hanging by a black ribbon round his neck’ – had hardly hidden his light under a bushel. But by 1688 Catholics were feeling sufficiently confident to celebrate their beliefs more openly than at any time since the reign of Queen Mary. Relief and rejoicing were tempered with charity. ‘The memory of past hardships you have suffered from some among them [Protestant bigots] may be apt to create provoking animosities and the Liberty you now enjoy may possibly tempt you to insult those who formerly abridged you of it. But it must be your care to prevent or suppress all such irregular Motions.’ Unfortunately, the quality of the organisation, which was available to the Vicars Apostolic, did not match the ebullience of their prose. They supervised the Church in their vast districts with little or no help. Cardinal Wiseman, looking back from the heyday of Victorian formality, complained that the Vicars Apostolic neither kept records nor observed proper procedures. ‘The whole episcopal regimen’ he wrote, ‘seems to have led a sort of nomadic life, wandering about in stage coaches and gigs from place to place.’33
Although James possessed both the will and the power to protect and promote individual Catholics and could, by declarations of tolerance made on his royal initiative, overrule the worst excesses of prejudice and bigotry, absolute and lasting security required Parliament to repeal the penal legislation. That would only be possible in a new House of Commons, from which many (if not all) the general ‘Exclusionist’ Members had been ejected. James proposed to bring that about by calling an election – after he had made sure that most of the successful candidates, many of whom would be returned unopposed, were sympathetic to his aims. The Lord Lieutenants were to ensure that reliable men were nominated. But that, in turn, required the removal of unreliable Lord Lieutenants. Two Catholics – Lord Waldegrave in Somerset and the Earl of Huntingdon in Leicester – replaced Protestants, and eleven other changes were made in three months.
In the less loyal counties, Justices, sheriffs and Deputy Lieutenants were cross-examined about their willingness to support the abolition of the Test Acts and penal laws. Office-holders who claimed that conscience prevented their agreement were urged at least to raise no objection to the King asserting unilaterally that every one of his subjects enjoyed freedom of worship. The Lord Lieutenants, who presided at the meetings, emphasised that the liberty would be available to dissenters of every denomination and that even functionaries who were not sympathetic to reform owed a duty of loyalty to the King – on whose goodwill their appointments depended. But the Members of Parliament who were eventually elected were not responsive to the King’s wishes. Neither of the appeals – one to the principle of universal tolerance and the other to the personal protection of self-interest – had the desired effect. James was eventually forced to conclude that he could not contrive a Parliament that would bend to his will. On May 4th 1688, using the royal prerogative, he made an Order in Council which suspended the penal legislation and the Test Acts and ordered that this second Declaration of Indulgence should be read out in parish churches in London on the last two Sundays in May and in the provinces on the two following Sundays.
Eight days later, William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was host to a dinner in Lambeth Palace at which the guests were about a dozen supposedly carefully chosen bishops. The choice was clearly not as careful as the Archbishop would have wanted, for the bishops of Chester and St David’s left in protest when the discussion had barely begun. None of those who remained wanted to be party to the dissemination of the King’s Declaration, but some of them feared that outright refusal would amount to disloyalty to the crown and would undermine the reputation for fidelity that was central to the stability of an Established Church. So it was agreed that a deputation should petition the King to change his mind. Six bishops, though not Sancroft, met James on May 18th, reinforced by the news that clergy in the City of London were unanimous in their refusal to obey the royal bidding. They agreed that they should make clear that their objection was less due to ‘any want of tenderness to dissenters’ than reluctance to involve the Church in a constitutional dispute which might end with Parliament ruling that the Declaration of Indulgence was illegal. Princess Anne applauded the refusal to publicise what she called ‘the most seditious document I have ever seen’.34
The bishops were not given an opportunity to develop their nice point. As soon as the King had read the petition, he accused the signatories of rebellion. The Bishop of Ely’s protestation – ‘We rebels! Sir, we are prepared to die at your feet’35 – was rendered slightly less effective by the delegation’s obdurate refusal to order that the proclamation be read from the pulpits of their several dioceses. The bishops were dismissed from the royal presence.
Three weeks later they were summoned, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, to appear before the Privy Council, where they were told that they would be charged with seditious libel. George Jeffreys – elevated from Lord Chief Justice to Lord Chancellor – would agree that they should be released from custody, while waiting to appear before the King’s Bench, only if they posted bail. They refused on the grounds that they were members of the House of Lords and therefore should be spared such indignities. They were remanded in custody and sent, by barge, along the Thames to the Tower. John Evelyn wrote, ‘Wonderful is the concern of the people for them … Infinite crowds of people on their knees begging their blessing and praying for them as they passed along Tower wharf.’36 It was further proof that England had become a Protestant nation – a fact that King James II recognised, without fully understanding how determined its people were to defend themselves from what they believed was the threat from Rome.
Few people of any substance wanted the King to persist with the proposed prosecutions. Many Catholics as well as Protestants were outraged by the imprisonment of the old and sick Archbishop of Canterbury, and most Catholics at Court thought it was foolish for the King to promote a fight which he could not possibly win. It was suggested that he might save face and bring the affair to a conclusion by first admonishing and then releasing the seven prisoners. But he insisted – advised, it was suspected, by Father Petre, who was influenced by the Jesuits – that the prosecution go ahead. The trial began in Westminster Hall on June 15th, but was adjourned for two weeks during which the bishops were released on bail. The resumed hearing lasted for a day, at the end of which two of the four judges summed up for the King and two for the bishops. The jury deliberated into the night and returned a verdict of not guilty. The result provided ample evidence of where, when they had to choose between Protestant Church and Catholic King, the English people’s sympathy lay. But on the day before the seven bishops were brought before the Privy Council an event occurred which made James’ deposition inevitable. Queen Mary gave birth to a son.
During the fifteen years of her marriage Mary’s numerous pregnancies had ended with miscarriages, stillbirths or the early death of the baby. It was therefore generally assumed that an heir apparent was out of the question and that the heir presumptive, the staunchly anti-Catholic Princess Mary, would inherit the throne. The unexpected birth undermined the argument that all Protestants had to do was wait because time was not on Rome’s side. Catholics exacerbated Protestant fears by declaring that God had worked another miracle.
Princess Anne denied that the Queen had ever given birth. She invented the slander – joyously repeated by rabid Protestants – that the baby was a changeling who had been smuggled into the palace in a warming pan. She claimed ‘good reason to suspect trickery … the principles of that religion being such that they will stop at nothing, be it never so wicked, if it will promote their interests’.37 Although she claimed there was ‘much reason to believe it is a false belly’, the best she could do, by way of evidence, was the claim that the Queen ‘has always gone into the next room to put on her smock’. The envious gossip had no effect. The Catholic King had a Catholic successor.
It may well be that, even without the birth of the boy who became the Old Pretender, James’ undisciplined, haphazard and precipitous promotion of Catholic interests would have proved too much for the Protestant establishment to stomach indefinitely. But it is at least possible that they would have made the best of him, in the knowledge that he was to be succeeded by his unequivocally Protestant daughter and her Dutch consort. The unexpected arrival extinguished all possibility of James living out his reign. William landed at Torbay with enough troops to defeat James, had the King chosen to fight. He did not – a wise choice, in the light of the desertion of his best general, John Churchill (soon to be Duke of Marlborough) and, perhaps more important, the rising up of what had become a Protestant nation in support of a Protestant claimant to the throne. James, his wife and baby son fled to France where the Bishop of Rheims, with more wit than sensitivity, compared him to Henry of Navarre, his maternal grandfather. The French king had famously declared that Paris was ‘worth a Mass’. His grandson had thought the Mass more important than the throne of three kingdoms.
There was an exodus of Catholic gentry to France. Those who could do so joined the King and Court at Saint-Germain. Rich widows joined the Convent of Our Lady of Syon in Paris or the Poor Clares in Rouen. It was at Syon that the cult of James the Martyr was born. After his death, a relic of James was displayed in the chapel and he was described in language that owed nothing to Christian charity. ‘Holy King James of blessed and glorious memory … was by the perfidious and undutiful and unnatural baseness of his son-in-law and nephew … dethroned and driven out of the kingdom; that detestable Prince joining with the treacherous defection of the Protestant subjects of England and a malevolent party which were the dregs of Cromwell’s Vipers’ blood.’38
The Catholic émigrés dreamed of a second Restoration and plotted and planned – sometimes with the encouragement of Spain or France – for England and Scotland to become Catholic countries again. But it was too late. A Church of England, with its chauvinistic overtones, appealed to a people who had no instinctive interest in dogma and liturgy, but had come to believe that the island race had little in common with its continental neighbours. James II offered false hope of a return to Rome. After his deposition, not even the dream survived. Catholics gradually came to accept the need to learn how to survive in an irrevocably Protestant nation.