Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Who were the Whigs? The term “whig” originally meant a Scottish Presbyterian rebel; as this implies, it was bestowed by the party’s enemies. In fact, many Whigs could trace themselves or their ancestry back, through Shaftsbury’s country bloc, to the Parliamentarian rebels of old. The Whigs’ principal policy initiative, the exclusion of York from the throne by act of parliament, implied parliamentary sovereignty over that of the king. Consistent with this, they supported limitations on royal power and opposed the establishment of a standing army. In James’s place, some proposed the king’s eldest and favorite but illegitimate son, James Scott, duke of Monmouth (1649–85). Since Monmouth’s main qualification, besides his dubious lineage, was his Protestantism, it should be obvious that the Whigs were anti-Catholic and, by implication, strongly in favor of Dissenters’ rights and a new Church settlement. In power, they would seek to abolish the Cavalier Code as it applied to Dissenters, while enhancing and enforcing its application to Roman Catholics. Since the Catholic menace was international in scope, they were also anti-French. They saw clearly the danger of Louis’s overarching ambitions. This, in turn, made them natural supporters of William of Orange and the Dutch. Finally, while many Whigs were country gentlemen, their embrace of Dissenters also made them popular with urban dwellers, particularly merchants.

  Shaftesbury and the Whigs cultivated this popularity by using many techniques that we associate with political campaigns today. First, they organized. They founded a number of political dining societies, the most famous of which was London’s Green Ribbon Club. At its meetings they planned electoral and parliamentary tactics, propaganda, and street demonstrations. They capitalized on the temporary end of press censorship, producing a torrent of partisan pamphlets and newspapers after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1679 (the number of new titles roughly doubling between 1677–8 and 1680–1). Running through this literature were several radical notions, some of which had not found their way into print since the Interregnum. Clearly, in arguing that Parliament could alter the succession, the Whigs rejected the divine basis of authority. In its place, they revived the supremacy of the common law, or even the old Leveller notion of “the sovereignty of the people,” but with a moderating twist. To most Whig country gentlemen, “the people” did not mean everybody in England but only those who elected and sat in Parliament. However one defined “the people,” all government, even in a monarchy, had its origins in their consent. Since that consent was given so that the government could protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens, Whigs argued that it could be withdrawn in the event that the ruler failed to provide that protection. In this particular case they argued further that consent could be withdrawn upon the accession of a papist: since a Catholic monarch’s allegiance would be outside the country to the pope, there would be no safeguard to life (remember Mary’s burnings, etc.), liberty, property, and so on. For as long as possible, Whigs refused to consider what this would mean if Charles II himself refused to acknowledge the peoples’ fears; that is, few Whigs would, before 1682, admit to themselves that they might, in fact, be justifying rebellion.

  The Whigs made their case so effectively that they won the first election in a landslide. This presented Charles II with a terrible dilemma. While he found Whig ideas abhorrent, he could not ignore their parliamentary majority and apparent popularity. He must have been sorely tempted to embrace Shaftesbury and the Whigs, jettison his brother and wife (neither of whom he much cared for), and agree to the succession of his illegitimate son (whom he clearly loved). This would give him a quiet life in the short term, but end his absolutist dreams in the long term. Instead, like his father in 1640–2, he played for time, hoping that Whig extremism would breed a Royalist reaction. Thus, when in the spring of 1679 the first Exclusion Parliament was about to pass a bill excluding York from the succession, Charles prorogued, then dissolved it.

  The elections for the second Exclusion Parliament, which took place in the late summer of 1679, resulted in another Whig landslide. In response, the king continued his strategy of delay, proroguing it repeatedly until October 1680. Shaftesbury and the Whigs saw this as yet another example of arbitrary Stuart rule. For a year they kept alive popular partisanship by organizing “monster” petitions, signed by thousands, urging Charles to summon Parliament. To put further pressure on the king, the Green Ribbon Club organized pope-burnings on November 5 and 17, the anniversaries of the Gunpowder Plot and Queen Elizabeth’s accession, respectively, through 1681. The Whigs turned these popular celebrations into elaborately stage-managed party rallies in which a host of popish bogey-men – Jesuits, cardinals, and, of course, the bishop of Rome himself – were processed through the streets of London before being burned in effigy in front of large crowds. But not everyone joined in the fun. The king prosecuted journalists supporting Exclusion and the Whig petitioners on charges of seditious libel. Conservative critics organized addresses from official bodies in “abhorrence” of the petitions. These Abhorrers became the first Tories.

  Who were the Tories? The term “Tory” was also a slang word first applied by the other side – this time for an Irish cattle thief. Their opponents considered Tories soft on Catholics (hence the Irish connection) because they did not favor excluding James from the throne. Based on Danby’s court group, which was in turn full of old Anglican Royalists, the Tories believed fervently in the sovereignty of the Crown. While they conceded the necessity for parliaments, for them the Civil Wars had taught that, ultimately, only the king could safeguard order. Because Parliament was subordinate to the king, and because God chose the king through hereditary succession, no human institution could exclude the next rightful heir, not even if he were a Catholic. As for rebellion, it was a heinous sin against the divine order. Even in the face of a bad ruler (which was not how they saw Charles II), Tories counseled patience, passive obedience, and non-resistance. Therefore, while they would soon become as skilled as the Whigs in appealing to the masses, in theory they deplored doing so. As all this implies, Tories embraced hierarchy, Anglican ceremony, and every link of the Great Chain of Being. They were not pro-Catholic, but they saw a far greater danger from the Dissenters who, they would point out, had actually succeeded in killing the last king, bringing revolution and chaos on England. Thus, they associated religious dissent with political disloyalty and so favored strict implementation of the Cavalier Code to force conformity to the Church of England. In foreign policy, while they viewed Louis XIV with some suspicion, most concluded that he was pursuing initiatives appropriate to any Divine Right monarch. In short, their foreign policy was pro- (or not particularly anti-) French. Toryism was especially popular among courtiers and, of course, the king and royal family. But like the Roundheads and Cavaliers of the Civil Wars, there were Whigs and Tories at every social level. Thus, while Shaftesbury and the Whig lords wined and dined Whig London councilmen, Tory lords or even Charles II provided venison for Tory apprentice feasts. While Whig mobs burned effigies of the pope, Tory mobs burned effigies of “Jack Presbyter.”

  Whig and Tory ideological battles produced classic works of political theory. The Tories upheld Divine Right monarchy, first printing Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings Asserted by Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) in 1680. Filmer argued that the king’s power derived directly from that bestowed by God on Adam, as the father of the whole human race. Tory tracts and sermons reinforced Filmer’s arguments for non-resistance to the divinely appointed sovereign. In response, Shaftesbury’s protégé, John Locke (1632–1704), wrote his Two Treatises of Government in the early 1680s (although they were not published until 1689–90), reviving the idea of Buchanan and other writers of the previous century, that the people had the right to resist. But Locke offered a secular rationale: resistance was justified not only against a bad religious settlement, but also against a bad king. Algernon Sidney (1623–83) penned a line-by-line rebuttal of Filmer while fellow Whigs discussed more radical steps. For example, proposals circulated for an “Asso
ciation,” a paramilitia to resist a possible Catholic coup. Again, Whigs claimed this was to protect the king, but when the king himself rejected it, Tories rightly decried it as threatening civil war.

  When Parliament finally met in October 1680, it refused to grant supply without Exclusion. The Second Exclusion Bill (which would have banned York not only from the succession but from England as well) passed the Commons quickly, only to be rejected by the Lords on November 15, 1680. MPs spoke darkly of conspiracy and civil war seemed imminent. Charles II hastily dissolved Parliament and summoned a new one to meet at Oxford, distant from Whig radicals in London. Still, Whigs dominated. The third Exclusion Parliament, the Oxford Parliament, met on March 21, 1681 and again began to consider the vexed question of the succession. But Charles, sensing that the Whig moment had passed, dissolved Parliament a week later, gambling that he could do without them for a while.

  Charles’s gamble worked because by 1681 public opinion was swinging back toward the Crown and its supporters. First, it became apparent that there was no Catholic plot to kill the king and promote his brother. Second, many landed gentlemen came to be persuaded by the Tory argument that to deny James’s right to the throne was akin to denying their right to inherit property. No landowner could enthusiastically stand for such a fracture in the Great Chain. Moreover, the Tories won the propaganda war. The Whig press wilted, as civil prosecutions and the barbs of Tory writers took their toll. In particular, John Dryden’s satirical poem Absalom and Achitophel compared Charles II to the Biblical King David, and held up the Whigs to merciless ridicule. Shaftesbury, for example, was portrayed as a man “In friendship false, implacable in hate / Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.” With Parliament dissolved and Whig propaganda silenced, the Tories were now in a position to have their revenge.

  The Tory Revenge and Reestablishment of Local Control, 1681–5

  In 1681, like his father in 1629, Charles II opted to rule without Parliament. As before, the decision was based on electoral realities: so long as the electorate continued to return Whigs to the House of Commons, the king could not work with them. But unlike his father, Charles II anticipated a time when he might have to do so. Therefore, using the power afforded him in the Corporation Act and a legal device called Quo Warranto, he began, once more, to tackle the issue of local control by revoking city charters, purging urban councils of Whigs and Dissenters and replacing them with loyal Tories. The king also purged the lieutenancy and the county bench to ensure that local control was more firmly in Tory hands. These newly purged town councils and county commissions of the peace renewed the prosecution of Nonconformists instead of Catholics, imprisoning some 1,300 Quakers alone by 1685. Moreover, since in many boroughs the corporation officers had the only votes, and since, everywhere else, local officials had a powerful influence on how votes were cast and counted, the king was also, in effect, packing the next parliament.

  In the meantime, Charles II had to figure out, as Charles I had done during the Personal Rule, how to live without parliamentary funds. Like his father, he immediately began to enhance his revenue while retrenching his expenses. He did the first by secretly accepting a subsidy of £125,000 a year from Louis XIV, and by pursuing stricter collection of the Customs, Excise, and other ordinary revenue. The latter was an especially good move because the trade boom of the 1670s was about to become a bonanza. A commercial revolution was beginning which would make English trade with India, its colonies in America, and the rest of Europe fabulously prosperous. This, in turn, increased the yield from all taxes to nearly £1.4 million a year. With this money, the Crown was able to maintain an army of 9,000 men in England, plus forces of a similar magnitude in Scotland and Ireland. As for the royal expenses, for once Charles II stuck to his budget, shutting down pension payments and halving household expenditure.

  If the Exclusion Crisis thus taught the king thrift, it also educated him in the loyalty of Anglican Tories and the value of propaganda. In order to retain that loyalty, Charles behaved himself with regard to religion, making no move toward Catholicism until he was on his deathbed in 1685, when he finally converted. While alive and well, he surrounded himself with loyal Anglicans, whose clergy responded from the pulpit with continued exhortations to passive obedience and non-resistance to the divinely appointed monarch. Toward the Whigs, Charles was relentless. In 1682 he threw out the election of two Whigs for sheriff of London, replacing them with Tories who would ensure compliant juries. As the courts went after even minor Whigs, Shaftesbury lost his nerve and fled to the Netherlands in late 1682. With his death there the following year, the Whigs lost their leader; without Parliament or elections to it, they lost their chief arena; and with the press muzzled and even feasting proscribed, they lost their chief weapons. They grew more frustrated, then more desperate, and, finally, more radical: in 1683 evidence emerged of plots to kidnap and kill the royal brothers Charles and James and/or foment an insurrection. Whether this was wild talk or a coherent plan, the Rye House Plot revelations ended all hope for Exclusion, gave the government further excuse for repression, and drove radical Whigs underground. Charles II used his small army to search homes for seditious papers and weaponry; Locke hid his papers and followed Shaftesbury abroad, as did Monmouth. Sidney died on the scaffold merely for writing his unpublished “Discourses Concerning Government.” Tory ideology, which equated Whig principles with fanaticism, seemed to have been vindicated – as were Whig charges of arbitrary Stuart rule. When he died of a stroke on February 6, 1685, Charles II left his successor a prosperous country, a healthy Treasury, a supportive national Church, an opposition Whig party in disarray, a compliant local government firmly in the hands of Tory loyalists, and a Crown that was more powerful and popular than it had been since Tudor times. Unfortunately, he left all of these things to his brother, James.

  James II and the Attempt at a Catholic Restoration, 1685–8

  James II (reigned 1685–8) ascended the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland on a wave of Royalist sentiment and good will. He was a Catholic, but the horrors of Cromwell’s regime and Shaftesbury’s extremism were much more recent than those of Bloody Mary and the Gunpowder Plot. At first, the new king did everything possible to maintain this popularity. His first official act was to promise in Privy Council to respect the constitution, the Church of England, and the property of his subjects. Then, as usual for a new monarch, he summoned a new parliament. The monarchy’s current popularity, as well as Charles II’s gerrymandering, helped return Tories in overwhelming numbers. The resulting Tory, Royalist Parliament voted the new king the same taxes as those enjoyed by Charles II. What it perhaps did not realize was that, thanks to the trade boom of the 1680s, those taxes now yielded far more than they had done in the previous reign. James II’s ordinary revenue came to about £1,600,000, some £300,000–400,000 a year more than Charles II had enjoyed. Moreover, the compliant new Parliament voted James an additional £400,000 annually for the next five to eight years to enable him to put down any rebellions which might arise during this time. In their defense, they were reacting to one at the very moment.

  In the summer of 1685, the Whig duke of Monmouth forced out of his exile in the Dutch republic, landed in the West Country with 150 soldiers, and raised a rebellion against the Catholic monarchy. He soon attracted a rag-tag army of Protestant tradesmen and farmers. Against this, thanks to his generous Tory Parliament, James II brought a much larger and better-equipped force staffed with loyal, and in some cases, Catholic officers. James had made these appointments on an emergency basis using his controversial power to dispense with the law in individual cases. This army, effectively led by the king’s favorite, John, Lord Churchill (1650–1722), crushed the rebels at Sedgemoor, near Bridgwater in Somerset. The aftermath revealed much about the new king’s character and purpose. First, he kept his army in being even after suppressing the rebellion. Second, he dispatched his lord chief justice, George, Baron Jeffreys (1644–89), to deal with the surrendered rebels.
Already known as “Hanging Judge Jeffreys” for his treatment of Whigs during the Tory revenge, he presided over a series of savage trials – 1,336 cases in nine days! – forever after known as “the Bloody Assizes.” These resulted in the execution of over 300 rebels, most of them poor men and women, by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Their rotting corpses were still being displayed in West Country villages a year later. A further 800 prisoners were transported to the American colonies. This should have given James’s subjects pause. But, for now, the new king sat secure on his throne, with rebellion defeated, the Whigs cowed, the Tories supreme, Parliament cooperative, the royal treasury full, the Church loyal, and the people apparently content with, if not necessarily enthusiastic over, their new sovereign. So what went wrong? How did James II manage to blow it all in just over three years?

  One place to look for an answer is in the new king’s personality. James II (see plate 20) was neither so clever, nor so subtle as his brother. As we have seen, he was incapable of dissembling the Catholicism that so alarmed his subjects. Instead, from the moment he became king he worshipped openly and ostentatiously, asking Sir Christopher Wren to design an elaborate Catholic chapel at Whitehall. As his piety might seem to imply, James II was not as fun-loving as Charles II. At the beginning of his reign he banished from Whitehall all the men and women of pleasure, including (albeit temporarily) his own mistress, Catherine Sedley, countess of Dorchester (1657–1717). In some ways, this sobriety was not such a bad thing after the scandalous behavior of the “Merry Monarch.” The Crown needed to restore its dignity and it needed to save money. The new king was not afraid of attacking entrenched interests and his orderly mind caused him to launch a major “downsizing” of the court, eliminating sinecure offices and much of the fee-taking system. The result was a smaller, more efficient, and thriftier court – but also one which was much less exciting and lucrative – than his brother’s had been.