Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  His career was pretty fraught too, as he shifted, not always in the same direction, from being one of Cromwell’s ministers to Charles’s Lord Chancellor. From that exalted position he moved into opposition once again, to become one of the king’s greatest and most dangerous opponents. For he was bold, unscrupulous, demagogic and a master of propaganda. As such, he chose the most modern and emotive icon as the symbol of his political strategy. The Monument, built to commemorate the Great Fire of London, and finished in 1677, just a year before the outbreak of the Popish Plot, was a modern marvel at 202 feet, the highest vantage point in the City and rivalled only by the spires of one or two of Wren’s equally new, rebuilt churches, which had likewise risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the fire.

  And the Monument was the sensational setting of the most effective piece of propaganda to emerge from Shaftesbury’s circle. Entitled An Appeal from the Country to the City, it enjoined Londoners to climb the 311 steps to the top of ‘your newest pyramid’ and admire the rebuilt city. Then they should imagine it on fire once more; the guns of the Tower turned on the City; the streets running with blood and the fires of Smithfield burning their Protestant victims at the stake again, as they had done in the reign of the last Roman Catholic monarch, Bloody Mary.

  All this would happen, the Appeal insisted, if a Catholic king were allowed to succeed.

  The Appeal didn’t name James directly. Instead, keeping up the topicality, it alluded to the bas-relief on the base of the Monument, which shows James assisting his brother Charles to extinguish the Great Fire. All this was a sham, it announced. Instead ‘one eminent Papist’ – James – had connived at the disaster, ‘pretend[ing] to secure many of the incendiaries’ – thought to be Catholic, of course – ‘but secretly suffer[ing]them all to escape … for a Popish successor cannot but rejoice in the flames of such a too powerful city’.

  Fired by such propaganda, between 1679 and 1681 the electorate returned three parliaments in which there was a clear Commons majority for James’s exclusion. Each was quickly dissolved by Charles, who was prepared to concede limitations on James’s powers as king but would not yield on his brother’s indefeasible hereditary right to succeed.

  Charles also had more cards than it at first seemed. The first was the division among his opponents about who should succeed if James were excluded. The more moderate Exclusionists favoured the Dutch line and wanted the succession to leapfrog a generation so that James’s daughter Mary would become queen on Charles’s death. Her marriage to the champion of Protestant Europe, William of Orange, satisfied everyone that the monarchy’s association with French Catholicism would then be over for good. But Shaftesbury and the radicals backed instead Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, James, duke of Monmouth.

  Born in 1649 of Charles’s affair with Lucy Walter, his first serious liaison, and made duke of Monmouth in 1662, James was handsome, charming, charismatic and amorous. He was also spoiled, badly educated, sensitive about his illegitimacy and, having been personally involved in both a mutilation and a murder, had an ugly streak of violence. The army was a natural career for such a man, and by 1678 he had succeeded to Oliver Cromwell’s old office of captain-general or commander-in-chief and won what military glory was available under Charles. More importantly than all that, Monmouth was unequivocally, ostentatiously Protestant.

  The Popish Plot and the ensuing Exclusion Crisis made Monmouth – popular, Protestant and princely – an obvious alternative to the dour and Catholic James and a natural ally for Shaftesbury.

  The only problem was his illegitimacy. But was he illegitimate? Rumours, carefully fanned by Monmouth himself, circulated to the effect that his parents had been secretly married. There were supposed to be witnesses and a black box containing irrefutable written evidence.

  But Charles, fond though he was of the strapping first fruit of his loins, was not prepared to allow Monmouth to shunt his legitimate brother James aside. Indefeasible hereditary right could not be undermined, however high the stakes. For this was the deepest principle of the Stuart dynasty. The result was one of the stranger scenes in English history when, in early January 1679, Charles, having summoned the Privy Council, solemnly declared ‘in the presence of Almighty God that he had never given or made any contract of marriage, nor was ever married to any woman whatsoever but his wife Queen Catherine’. The declaration was then signed by the king, witnessed by those present and enrolled in the records in Chancery.

  In a further, vain attempt to lower the temperature, both rivals for the throne, first James and then Monmouth, were packed off into honourable exile. James, unwisely, went to Catholic Brussels before being made governor of Scotland, while Monmouth went to Holland, where he was correctly but coolly received by Mary and William of Orange, his Protestant rivals for the succession.

  The inability of the Exclusionists to agree on a single candidate was one thing strengthening the hand of Charles and James; the other was the perceived extremism of the Exclusionists of whatever stripe. For everything – their language, their demagogy, their violent anti-popery, their allies among the Protestant sects – revived uncomfortable memories of the Civil War.

  The result was a pamphlet war and a clash of ideas out of which was born our modern two-party system. The Exclusionists were known as Whigs, or Scottish Covenanting rebels; the anti-Exclusionists as Tories, or Irish outlaws and cattle thieves.

  The Whigs believed in religious toleration, limited government and a kingship that finally answered to the people; the Tories in divine-right monarchy, indefeasible hereditary succession, passive obedience and a monopolistic Church of England that was equally hostile to Catholics on the right and to Protestant dissenters on the left. The Whigs were pro-Dutch; the Tories generally pro-French. The Whigs had made the running in the Exclusion Crisis; now it was the Tories’ turn.

  For they made the forceful point that there was no precedent for preventing the next in line from taking his or her rightful inheritance. Mary Queen of Scots was an example of a Catholic heir. She had been executed before she could succeed Elizabeth, but that was because of her treason, not her religion. The Tories also pointed out that if James were excluded from the throne, the monarchy would be ruined for ever. In effect, England would become a republic. The nominal ruler would come to the throne only if he or she met the conditions laid down in advance by Parliament. However much Anglicans detested Catholicism, the alternative prospect of an elected, circumscribed monarchy was many times worse. In this Tory scenario, the Exclusionists were portrayed as modern Cromwellians, who were refighting the Civil War and attempting to destroy the monarchy and the Church of England. It was an emotional and effective appeal to English loyalties.

  Charles met his fourth parliament in the Convocation Hall at Oxford. The Commons and Shaftesbury’s group in the Lords were, as usual, hot for Exclusion. But Charles, sensing the turning of the political tide, stood firm. ‘I have law and reason and all right-thinking men on my side; I have the Church’ – and here the king pointed to the bishops – ‘and nothing will ever separate us.’

  After sitting for a bare week, the Parliament was dissolved. Nor, thanks to a new subsidy from Louis XIV and booming revenues from trade, did Charles ever have to summon another one. Instead, he could turn to the congenial task of taking his revenge on Shaftesbury and the Whigs for the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. Charles began by attacking the stronghold of the Whigs in the City and the other towns’ corporations. Their charters were revoked and their governing bodies purged of dissenters and Whigs and packed with Tories.

  In despair at the sudden turn of events, the Whig leaders now made the mistake of dabbling, very half-heartedly, in treason. A faction plotted to assassinate Charles and James, and put Monmouth on the throne. It was badly planned and attracted few followers. But the king struck them down ruthlessly. And, although the plot was the work of a small group, the Exclusionists as a whole were tainted by their treason. One Whig lord committed suicide in the Tower, t
wo were publicly beheaded and most of the rest, including Shaftesbury and Monmouth, fled into exile in the Netherlands. There Shaftesbury died. But his secretary and intellectual factotum, John Locke, who had devised the operation for the insertion of the tube and tap into his master, continued writing and working in the congenial atmosphere of Dutch tolerance and freedom, completing his great work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

  Meanwhile, England witnessed a Tory triumph, which, like the French absolutism it so much resembled, expressed itself in soaring stone and brick. The statue of Charles I – the Tories’ martyred hero – was re-erected in London; at Winchester, a huge new palace, destined to be the English Versailles, was being rushed to completion; and, above all, the huge bulk of St Paul’s was rising over the City of London as the noblest, most eloquent and most crushing symbol of an Anglican absolutism.

  If St Paul’s was the symbol of the Tory triumph, its intellectual centre was Oxford. And it was there that, in Convocation on 21 July 1683, the University of Oxford issued a solemn declaration ‘against certain pernicious books and their damnable doctrines’. It is an Anglican syllabus of errors, in which all the doctrines of Whiggism and their authors are condemned as ‘false, seditious and impious, and most of them … also heretical and blasphemous’. Instead, the university proclaimed that Toryism was an eternal verity and the duty of ‘submission and obedience [to kings] to be absolute, and without exception’.

  In other words, Anglicanism and royalism were one, as they had been from the beginning under Henry VIII and right through the Civil War.

  But what would happen if the king ceased to be Anglican?

  England would soon find out. For on 6 February 1685, Charles II died, having converted at last to Catholicism in his very final moments, and was succeeded without a struggle by the proudly Catholic James. The result would test the relationship of Church and state to destruction and send a Stuart on his travels once more.

  Chapter 20

  Royal Republic

  James II, William II, Mary II

  WE ALL KNOW THAT ENGLAND was conquered by William the Conqueror in 1066. But we have forgotten, or do not care to remember, that, 600 years later, England was also conquered by another William. William of Orange was Dutch, rather than Norman, and, while there’s no doubt that the Norman Conquest changed England radically, the consequences of the Dutch conquest of 1688 were similarly profound, and not just for this country but, arguably, for the whole world.

  It began to heal the breaches of the Civil War, which the Restoration of 1660 had tried but failed to do. It turned England from a feeble imitator of the French absolute monarchy into the most powerful and most aggressively modernizing state in Europe.

  In short, it invented a modern England, a modern monarchy, perhaps even modernity itself.

  I

  All this would have seemed like the dream of a madman only a few years previously in 1685, when James II had succeeded to the throne. Then, England was a country still shaped by Henry VIII’s religious settlement and the vast dynastic mural of Henry, which showed him as head both of his family and the Church, was still one of the wonders of Whitehall Palace for the new king to admire and to imitate. For successive monarchs had tried to exploit the vast powers of the Supremacy to build up power and wealth and rule unfettered by influence from Parliament.

  And towards the end of his reign, it looked as if Charles II had finally succeeded. Bolstered by the support of the High Anglican Tories (as well as secret subsidies from his cousin Louis XIV) Charles managed to rule without Parliament for the last four years of his reign, although the cost was a passive foreign policy that gave France a free hand in Europe. And when Charles unexpectedly died in February 1685, aged fifty-five, the strength of the Stuart monarchy he had restored was underlined by the unchallenged accession of his brother James to the throne.

  Just a few years earlier James’s position as his brother’s rightful heir had been in grave jeopardy following his open conversion to Catholicism. Yet together they had ridden out the storm, even if Charles, acutely aware of the power of anti-Catholic sentiment, had been heard to prophesy that James would be king for no more than three years.

  But no one paid much attention, least of all James himself. Now, as he was proclaimed king on 6 February, crowds of Londoners toasted him in free wine and cheered. The fellows and undergraduates at Oxford ‘promised to obey the King without limitations or restrictions’. There were similar oaths throughout the country and no sign of resistance to the first openly Catholic monarch since Bloody Mary. It seemed a miracle. And such James devoutly believed it to be.

  That a convert to the Church of Rome could nonetheless become head of the Church of England was testimony to the power of the idea that underlay the Royal Supremacy: that the highest religious duty of an Anglican was to obey the king, who was God’s anointed vice-regent on Earth.

  The smoothness of James’s accession was underscored by the magnificence of his coronation. It took place on St George’s Day and it was the king’s command to do ‘All that Art, Ornament and Expense could do to the making of the Spectacle Dazzling and Stupendous’. Henry Purcell, Master of the King’s Music, composed and directed the music, which culminated in his great anthem ‘My heart is inditing’. Samuel Pepys, as one of the barons of the Cinque Ports, helped support the canopy over James in the initial procession from Westminster Hall to the Abbey. The final grand firework display centred on a blazing sun, the emblem of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV of France, while the great crowned figure of Monarchia (‘Monarchy’) strongly suggested that England was going the same way.

  Not everyone was happy, of course, in particular a group of Whig exiles in the Dutch Republic. They had been the architects of the parliamentary attempts to keep James from the throne, and they had been forced to flee when they had lost the political battle to Charles’s Anglican Tory supporters. Now James’s accession and the election of a complaisant Tory parliament that seemed ready to do James’s bidding were the fulfilment of their worst fears. Only an armed invasion, they thought, could save England from Catholic absolutism. Its natural leader was Charles II’s bastard son, James, duke of Monmouth, who, unsatisfactory as he was, had been the Whig candidate for the throne during the Exclusion Crisis.

  Monmouth, who had come to enjoy the ease of a comfortable exile, took some persuading, however. But eventually he felt honour bound and, on 24 May, he set sail from Amsterdam with a pathetically small force of three ships and eighty-three men. They made for Lyme Regis in Dorset because this was an area where the Good Old Cause of English republicanism lived on. It was also a stronghold of dissenting Protestantism. And Monmouth’s manifesto, which even seemed to leave the issue of the monarchy open, was designed to appeal to such men. He promised to free the English from the ‘Absolute Tyranny’ instituted by his uncle. He accused James of responsibility for the Papal Plot against Charles, the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey and even of Charles II. Given the success that Titus Oates had enjoyed in working up the country to a pitch of anti-Catholic hysteria, and the popularity of the Exclusion parliaments, Monmouth believed that the country would be eager to rebel against the new Catholic king. But just three thousand at most joined his ranks. And they included no gentlemen.

  Desperate to win over such leading figures in society – the so-called ‘better-sort’ – Monmouth had himself proclaimed king. It was intended to give his cause the veneer of legitimacy and demonstrate that a successful outcome of his rebellion would be nothing more radical than a restored Protestant monarchy. The result was to alienate his existing supporters without gaining any new ones. It also meant that, as a rival king, he could expect no reconciliation with his uncle. James II, for his part, worried about his hold on both Scotland and London, was able to spare only two or three thousand troops against Monmouth. They were badly led but at least they were professional soldiers. And that proved decisive.

  The showdown came at Sedgmoor in Somerset on 6 July 1685. Boxed i
n by the royal army, Monmouth decided that his only chance was to launch a surprise night attack. The tactic made sense but his scratch forces were incapable of carrying it out and, once day broke, were routed by the king’s troops: 500 were killed and 1500 taken prisoner.

  By then Monmouth had already fled, disguised as a shepherd. But it was only two days before King James II of England, as he called himself, was found hiding in a ditch in his disguise, captured and taken to London. There was no need for a trial, since he had already been condemned as a traitor by an Act of Attainder rushed through by the Tory Parliament. Nevertheless, Monmouth humbled himself by begging for his life on his knees before James. At once his boastful claims to majesty disappeared as he pleaded that he had been forced against his will to declare himself king. His uncle, appalled at such cowardice, was implacable. Monmouth was brought to Tower Hill for execution on 15 July.

  Monmouth’s death, like his life, was a mixture of tragedy and farce. The two Anglican bishops who accompanied him to the scaffold tried to force a public acknowledgement of guilt out of him. He reluctantly said ‘Amen’ to a prayer for the king but refused absolutely to swear to the Anglican shibboleth of non-resistance to royal power.

  Finally, the wrangling, widely felt to be indecent in the face of death, stopped, and Monmouth prepared himself for execution. He begged the executioner not to mangle him and bribed him heavily. Then he knelt down. But the first blow merely gashed him, and he turned his head as if to complain. Now thoroughly unnerved, the headsman took four further strokes but still failed to kill him. At last, he severed the duke’s head with a knife. Many of Monmouth’s supporters followed him to a bloody end at the hands of the public executioner.