by Allan Massie
The tide was now running strongly against the Whigs. In 1681 Charles called a new parliament to meet at royalist Oxford, away from the influence of any London mob that Shaftesbury might stir up. ‘Remember your royal father and keep the staff in your own hand,’ one called out as he rode into the city. ‘By God I shall,’ replied the King.28 But there was no danger now, no need for force. The storm had blown itself out, the turbulence was spent. Charles made his determination clear – there would be no Exclusion – and dismissed the parliament. Shaftesbury fled to Holland, where he died in 1683: Buckingham, reputation gone and fortune going, dwindled into insignificance, and would also soon be dead. Monmouth remained in exile. York returned to London, and Charles strolled with his spaniels in St James’s Park.
For the last four years of his reign, the King ruled without Parliament. At last he had money enough, thanks partly to payments from Cousin Louis, partly to the revival of trade and the consequent increase in revenue from customs. He had achieved his aim. There was no fear that he would ever have to go on his travels again (though he expressed his suspicion that his brother might). Only the occasional threat from Barillon, the French ambassador, to reveal the terms of his agreement with his master in Versailles could disturb the King’s equanimity, and for the most part life was good. In 1683 a wild conspiracy to assassinate the royal brothers as they rode to Newmarket – the Rye House Plot – was discovered, and Charles used this to further stabilise his position. A number of Whigs, not all closely connected with the plot, were executed. London, always troublesome, had its charter called in, revised and reissued in such terms as to ensure the election of a Tory corporation. When a deputation of gentlemen from Berkshire urged the King to call a Parliament, he smiled and said, ‘I marvel that my neighbours should meddle with my business – but we shall agree better when we meet over a cup of ale at Windsor’ – and they departed, flattered by his attention, won over by his charm, if also puzzled to reflect that they had come away from his presence happy though they had received nothing.29
Charles had suffered a mild stroke at the height of the furore over the Popish Plot and the Exclusion, but his health still seemed good except that he was inclined to fall asleep after dinner. He walked in the park without guards and rode his horse at Newmarket, and was ready to converse with anyone on any topic. He still told his stories, though many of them were old, and his bored courtiers had heard them too often. He paid polite attention to his Queen and more agreeable attention to his mistresses, as if the shadows were not lengthening. But Rupert had died in 1682, Buckingham was no longer there to amuse him, and Monmouth could not safely be brought home. York remained, of course, but though Charles was fond of his brother, he had seldom found much amusement in his company.
Then on 1 February 1685, he had another stroke. The doctors averred he could not live more than a few hours. But he rallied, and bells were rung to celebrate his recovery. Prematurely; another stroke days later and he began to sink, rousing himself only to apologise for being ‘such an unconscionable time a-dying’. Still, when the Anglican clergy surrounding his bedside urged him to receive the sacraments of the Church, he said, ‘Time enough’ and dismissed them.
A Roman Catholic priest, Father Huddleston, was brought to him. He had been one of those who had aided Charles’s escape in the first days after Worcester, and had now been living in the Palace of Whitehall for some sixteen years. ‘Here,’ said York, ‘is a man who once saved your life, and is now come to save your soul.’30 So in his last hours, the great sceptic was received into the Church of Rome and given absolution. He had at last kept one part of the promise he had made to Minette and Cousin Louis when he signed that treaty at Dover, but the England he left behind was still as overwhelmingly and defiantly Protestant as he had always known it to be. Was he sincere in this deathbed repentance and conversion? Perhaps. A twentieth-century convert to Catholicism, G. K. Chesterton imagined that in this last act of his life Charles expressed his perfect scepticism: ‘The wafer might, or might not be, the Body of Christ; but then it might, or might not, be a wafer.’31
‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ Charles said to his brother, and asked him to tell Fubbs, the Duchess of Portsmouth, how much he loved her. He requested to be lifted up so that he might see the day break once more, and soon afterwards, the most intelligent, charming and deceitful of Stuart kings was dead.
Chapter 14
James VII and II (1685–88): Author of His Own Tragedy
There was an old saying in Scotland that the Stewarts were like the horses reared in the Aberdeenshire district of Mar, excellent when young, deteriorating more quickly than most. Few of the kings after the two Roberts lived to be old; nevertheless, signs of rapid deterioration were evident in James I and James V, while in the last years of his reign, James VI and I was evidently no longer the energetic and capable king he had been in Scotland. To none of the family, however, is the judgement more surely applied than to James VII and II.
James inherited a secure throne, thanks to the skill, determination and loyalty of his brother. He was even popular at first, for there was a strong reaction in his favour. Yet in less than four years he had lost the support of the Crown’s fervent defenders, the Church of England men; provoked some of his greatest, or at least richest, subjects to enter into treasonable negotiations with a foreign power and solicit the invasion of England; then found himself deserted by those in whom he had placed most trust; lost his nerve and fled his kingdom. For all this to happen demanded a quite remarkable degree of folly.
As we have seen, James when a young man was highly thought of. He was known to be brave; he was believed, quite rightly, to be honest, a man of his word unlike his charming brother. Nobody thought him intelligent, but he was loyal, affable, and proved himself, as Lord High Admiral, to be a capable and conscientious administrator. Highly sexed, like most of the family, he had a succession of mistresses. There was nothing remarkable in that, except perhaps that they were generally thought unattractive, even ugly. After York’s conversion to Catholicism, Charles joked that he thought his brother’s mistresses must be given to him by his priests as a penance; but it is more likely that James was shy and maladroit, and found it easier to seduce plain women than beautiful ones. The most famous of his mistresses was Arabella Churchill, daughter of a West Country Cavalier squire and Member of Parliament, Sir Winston Churchill. Anthony Hamilton described her as ‘a tall creature, pale-faced, and nothing but skin and bone’. He revised his opinion, however, when she fell from her horse, and those who crowded round ‘found her in a negligent posture; they could hardly believe that limbs of such exquisite beauty could belong to Miss Churchill’s face’.1 James had three children by her: James, who was made Duke of Berwick and became a marshal of France; Henry, who was made titular Duke of Albemarle after the revolution of 1688; and a daughter, Henrietta, who married Lord Waldegrave. More important however was Arabella’s brother, John Churchill, whom we have met as the lover of Lady Castlemaine and who would much later become famous as the Duke of Marlborough and England’s greatest commander. James regarded him with affection, treated him as his protégé, and advanced his career.
The most significant event of James’s early life was his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. He had been a zealous Church of England man; he was now an utterly devoted Catholic. His sincerity cannot be questioned. His faith nearly caused him to be excluded from the succession; his determination to further the interests of his Church as he understood them cost him his throne. There was nothing in him of his brother’s cynical flexibility or of the temper that had led their grandfather, Henry of Navarre, to slough off his Protestantism and convert to Rome in order to win acceptance as Henry IV of France. Had James remained a Church of England man, he might have had a successful, even glorious reign, for he was unquestionably patriotic, and in character and narrow range of interests far more in tune with Cavalier Tories than his sceptical brother had ever been. Indeed, he was as stupid as any rude cou
ntry squire.
He was popular in the first months of his reign. Many were relieved that the succession had passed off without incident. Others felt ashamed that the country had come so close to depriving James of what was his by right. So his first Parliament was as easy as any parliament of any Stuart king, and it happily voted him a larger revenue than his brother had ever been granted.
Nevertheless, two rebellions broke out in 1685, one in Scotland, led by the Marquis of Argyll, son of the Covenanter who had crowned Charles II at Scone and been executed after the Restoration; the other in England led by Monmouth. Both were futile, ill prepared, ill co-ordinated, and both, as it proved, found negligible support. Argyll’s was quickly suppressed; he followed his father to the block. Monmouth had been living in Holland, but understandably received neither encouragement nor support from William of Orange, whose own wife Mary was James’s legitimate heir. The rebellion was an act of utter folly, for Monmouth was a sufficiently experienced soldier to know how little chance a hastily raised army could have against regular troops. If he had any expectation that the Whig nobility who had supported his claim to the throne during the Exclusion crisis would now support him, he was sorely deluded. But still he made the venture, and, on landing at Lyme in Dorset, issued a proclamation that made assertions no reasonable man could believe. Apart from declaring his own legitimacy, he accused James of being responsible for the Great Fire of London, with engaging in conspiracy against Charles (the Popish Plot), with commissioning the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and with poisoning his own brother, Monmouth’s father. This was a tissue of absurdities. He further declared that the King’s religion debarred him from the throne, that three successive parliaments had voted for his exclusion, and that the present parliament was no true representative of the nation. Finally, he declared himself to be the rightful king.
The rebellion was a wild gamble. Probably there was never any chance of success. Failure was however made more certain by Monmouth’s indecision. Instead of marching with such support as he had gathered to Bristol or Exeter, cities with a Roundhead tradition, he delayed at Lyme, doubtless hoping that some men of standing would join him. But this hesitation allowed the government to bring troops from Scotland and time for the arrival of an English regiment from the Dutch service, which the Prince of Orange had dispatched to assist his father-in-law. Eventually when the royal army was assembled at Sedgemoor under the command of Lord Feversham and John Churchill, Monmouth resolved on a night attack. The ground had been incompetently reconnoitred, the attack foundered at an open ditch, all was soon seen to be lost, and Monmouth fled. He was taken prisoner three days later, found in a ditch, miserable, hungry and wholly demoralised. He was brought to London, where Parliament had already passed an act of attainder against him. He sought an audience with his uncle the King, which was granted. He protested that he had signed his declaration without reading it, said he had been led on by evil men, and offered to convert to Catholicism if the King would spare his life. James was ready to send him a priest, but refused to commute the sentence.
Macaulay’s account of this interview is indignant and scornful: ‘The King cannot be blamed for determining that Monmouth should suffer death…But to see him and not spare him was an outrage on humanity and decency.’ Yet Monmouth himself had begged for the meeting and, as Macaulay recorded, had claimed to be in possession of ‘a secret which he could not entrust to paper, a secret which lay in a single word, and which, if he spoke that word, would secure the throne against all danger’.2 There was in truth no such secret, but it is unreasonable to blame James for granting an interview in which it was, apparently, to be divulged. As for the poor Duke, the historian condemns his ‘pusillanimous fear’ and writes contemptuously of his abject behaviour. No doubt Monmouth behaved badly, worse than many of his wretched followers. But historians have rarely had their own courage and resolution put to such a test, or found themselves in danger of having their head struck off by an axe.
Punishment for the rebels was harsh, rendered obnoxious by the savage relish with which they were pursued and condemned by the Lord Chief Justice, Jeffreys. Given the feebleness of the enterprise, leniency might have been a wiser, as well as more generous, policy than the use of the law as an instrument of revenge. But James could not forget the innocent Catholic victims of the Popish Plot, the attempt to deprive him of his rightful throne, the Whig conspiracy to murder him and his brother. The so-called ‘Bloody Assizes’ held by Jeffreys were cruel and horrible, as cruel and horrible as Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland.
The lack of support Monmouth had attracted and the ease with which the rebellion had been suppressed encouraged James to try to repeal the Test Act, which excluded his Catholic co-religionists from holding public office or commissions in the army or navy. Debate in Parliament was fierce. Burnet, a Scots Episcopalian and by no means an unprejudiced witness, summed it up as follows.
The truth is, all who argued for the repeal had no more to say than this – that it was against the rights of the Crown to deny the King the service of all his subjects, and an insufferable affront done him to oblige all those whom he should employ to swear his religion was idolatrous; whereas those on the other side declared that the Test was the best fence they had for their religion, which, if once given up, all the rest should follow; and that if the King might by his authority supersede such a law…it was in vain to think of law any more; the Government would then become absolute and arbitrary.3
Both arguments had some validity, but from James’s point of view the Test Act was an abomination. When passed, a dozen years previously, it had compelled him to resign the post of Lord High Admiral in which he delighted; now it deprived him of the service of his fellow Catholics, who were his most loyal subjects. He set out to circumvent the act by use of the royal prerogative, claiming the right to dispense with the law in individual cases and, more generally, to suspend any law. This was alarming, especially to those who believed that the stability of the state depended on the ability of the Anglican ascendancy to exclude Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters from public life. To their mind, defence of the liberty of England required that freedom be denied to all whose view of true religion differed from theirs.
James now tried to construct an alliance between all those excluded, and to cultivate the Protestant dissenters. Given that it is improbable that he should have supposed there was any chance of making England Catholic again, he may well have been sincere in proposing the suspension of discriminatory laws and advocating toleration. He was a devoted Catholic, but not a bigoted one. Among his friends was the leading Quaker William Penn; he supported Penn’s establishment of a colony (later named Pennsylvania) in America.
Yet his policy was unrealistic, for in general the Protestant dissenters were even more fiercely anti-Catholic, and disposed to believe in popish plots, than the dominant Anglicans. They were the heirs of the opposition to Charles I, and they had supported Shaftesbury’s attempt to exclude James from the throne. They eyed the approaches the King made to them with suspicion. Moreover, like the Anglicans, they were alarmed by the army James was creating, stationed at Hounslow Heath on the outskirts of London, and staffed by an ever-increasing number of Catholic officers. What was its purpose if not to advance the Catholic interest and suppress opposition to the King’s lack of respect for Parliament and the law?
Events in France now further inflamed Protestant opinion. The French religious wars of the sixteenth century had ended with a compromise, which, while maintaining Catholicism as the official state religion, had granted liberty of worship to Protestants. But Louis XIV had been persecuting Protestants for years, provoking a rebellion in the Cevennes, suppressed with a deal of brutality. Now, urged on by his bishops and his second wife (the devout Madame de Maintenon), he was on the point of revoking the Edict of Nantes, which had secured the French Protestants their rights. Many chose to emigrate rather than submit. They flocked to the Netherlands, to Prussia and to England. The
ir arrival inevitably intensified suspicion of the policies being pursued by a Catholic king, for if Louis so viciously persecuted Protestants, whose liberty of worship had previously been guaranteed by law, might not James follow suit?
In the years since the Restoration, Church of England divines had proclaimed a doctrine of ‘non-resistance’. Inspired by their memories of the civil war, they held that it was sinful to offer opposition (resistance) to an anointed king. James now put their sincerity to the test. First he challenged them in the citadel of High Anglicanism, the ostentatiously royalist University of Oxford. He appointed a Catholic as master of Magdalen College, and when the college fellows objected, expelled them and replaced them with Catholics. This was stupid and provocative, though no doubt to his mind it was only just that Catholics should no longer be excluded from the university, or at least from one of its colleges. Foolishly self-confident, he pressed on, disregarding the hostility with which his measure was greeted.
Next, in 1687, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending the Penal Laws against Catholics and the acts known as the Clarendon Code, which had imposed restrictions on the Protestant dissenters’ freedom of worship. The failure of Charles II’s similar 1672 declaration should have been a warning, but James was now deaf to reason. He ordered that the declaration be read from every pulpit on two successive Sundays, and when seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to do so, he had them arrested and charged with seditious libel. Their counsel argued that the King could legislate only through Parliament, and that his attempt to bypass Parliament was illegal. There was general rejoicing in London when they were acquitted.
