Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  The Whigs had another martyr and James, so he thought, another miracle. But the challenge to James’s monarchy was to come not from the divided and dispirited Whigs but from the apparently all-powerful and all-loyal Tories. The Tories had given James rock-solid support throughout the Exclusion Crisis; now in return they naturally expected that he – Catholic though he was – would be equally unwavering in his support for the Church of England. And, at first, it looked as though he would be.

  Things got off to a good start with James’s speech to the first Privy Council meeting of his reign. He spoke off the cuff. But an official version was worked up and published with royal approval:

  I have been reported a man for arbitrary power; but that is not the only story which has been made of me. I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this government, both in church and state, as it is by law established. I know the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy, and the members of it have shown themselves good and lawful subjects: therefore I shall always take care to defend and support it.

  His audience applauded and James basked in their approval. Parliament voted him a vast income. Few kings had come to the throne with such wealth, loyalty and goodwill.

  In fact, there was misunderstanding on both sides: the Tories thought that James had promised to rule as though he were an Anglican; James assumed that the Tories and the Church would continue to support him whatever he did. Both were quickly disillusioned.

  For James was a man with a mission. The last Catholic monarch to rule in England was Mary Tudor. The piety, the sacrifices and the vicissitudes of his ancestor gave James hope. Like James, Mary had succeeded to the throne against overwhelming odds, which she took to mean that God had given her a mission to reconvert England to the true faith. The new king had overcome the full force of Parliament and the country’s inbred hostility to Catholics. Divine purpose must lie behind these miracles. What clearer sign could God give that He supported the Catholic cause? The king also believed that he was on a personal journey of salvation. He had sinned by sleeping with innumerable women of easy virtue. He had to atone for those sins, and the one sure way of doing so was to fulfil his mission. James, we know from his own private devotional writings, was driven by this burning sense of divine purpose: ‘’T’was the Divine Providence that drove me early out of my native country and ’t’was the same Providence ordered it so that I passed most of [the time] in Catholic kingdoms, by which means I came to know what their religion was …’ ‘The hand of God’ was demonstrated in the failure of the attempt to exclude him from the throne: ‘God Almighty be praised by whose blessing that rebellion [of Monmouth] was suppressed …’

  Such was James’s mission. But what of the method of Catholic conversion? Was Britain to become Catholic within his lifetime, or was this the beginning of a long process of counter-reformation? Would it be by coercion? Or persuasion?

  Here memories mattered. Bloody Mary had used the rack and the stake and, thanks to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the memory was still fresh in England. So too were the stabbings, drownings and defenestrations of Protestants in the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve, the pogrom of Protestants which had occurred in Paris during the French Wars of Religion in 1572. Now these memories, which had scarcely faded, were reanimated in the most dramatic possible fashion by Louis XIV of France, the outstanding contemporary Catholic king and James’s model and mentor.

  For on 22 October 1685, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, which, by granting toleration to French Protestants, had brought the Wars of Religion to an end. News reached England quickly and the effect was dramatic. John Evelyn recorded in his diary:

  The French persecution of the Protestants raging with the utmost barbarity … The French tyrant abolishing the Edict of Nantes … and without any cause on the sudden, demolishing all their churches, banishing, imprisoning, sending to the galleys all the ministers, plundering the common people and exposing them to all sorts of barbarous usage by soldiers sent to ruin and prey upon them.

  In fact James, who was no lover of persecution, protested, albeit discreetly, to Louis. But in vain. From now on, every move James made to ease the burdens on English Catholics and bring them back into political life would be read against the background of the events in France. Only six months after his accession, James’s honeymoon was over.

  II

  Could something like the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes happen in England? A Catholic army harass English Protestants and compel them to convert or to emigrate? Circumstances in England made it infinitely improbable. But James, by his single-minded determination to allow Catholicism a level playing field in England with the established, Protestant Church, did his best to make the improbable seem a real possibility.

  In response to Monmouth’s Revolt, James had recruited a professional army 20,000 strong. And included in the officer corps were a hundred Roman Catholics. This was acceptable in an emergency; it was a red rag to a bull once the revolt was suppressed, since the employment of Catholics in the army, as in all public posts, was forbidden by the Test Act, which had been passed under Charles II in response to James’s own conversion to Catholicism.

  This was the background to the recall of Parliament, which James opened on 9 November 1685, just as the first wave of French Protestant refugees, numbering several thousand, reached London.

  Like his father, Charles I, the king came to Parliament ‘with marks of haughtiness and anger upon his face, which made his sentiments sufficiently known’. Then, with characteristic bluntness, James tackled the issue of Catholic officers head-on in his speech from the throne, when he vowed that nothing would ever make him give them up: ‘to deal plainly with you, after having had the benefit of their services in the time of danger, I will neither expose them to disgrace, nor myself to the want of their assistance, should a second rebellion make it necessary’.

  This was to fling down a challenge to both Houses of Parliament. In the Commons, a backbencher invoked the spirit of the Long Parliament in 1641, on the eve of the Civil War: ‘I hope we are Englishmen and not to be frightened from our duty by a few high words.’ He was arrested and sent to the Tower for his disrespectful language. There were other, more influential voices being heard. In the Lords, the bishop of London declared that the Test Act was the chief security of the Church of England.

  Furious and frustrated, James dismissed Parliament. He would have to get round the Test Act some other way. The only other body whose authority remotely compared with that of Parliament was the judiciary. During the period of his personal rule, James’s father, Charles I, had used the judges to authorize the collection of taxes that Parliament refused to grant; now James turned to the judges to get round the Test Act that Parliament refused to repeal.

  First the bench of judges was purged of waverers; then a test case was brought on behalf of a Catholic army officer to whom James had granted a royal ‘dispensation’ or waiver from the requirements of the Test Act.

  The Lord Chief Justice read the verdict on behalf of his almost unanimous colleagues. It could hardly have been clearer. Or more subversive: We think we may very well declare the opinion of the court to be that the King may dispense in this case … upon these grounds:

  That the Kings of England are sovereign princes.

  That the laws of England are the King’s laws.

  That therefore ’tis an inseparable prerogative of the Kings of England to dispense with penal laws in particular cases, and upon particular necessary reasons.

  That of those reasons and those necessities the King himself is sole judge.

  That this is not a trust invested in … the King by the people, but the ancient remains of the sovereign power and prerogative of the Kings of England.

  This ruling transformed Parliament into a mere sleeping partner in the constitution: it might pass what laws it liked; whether and on whom they were enforced was purely up to the king.

  But, most of all, the judges’ ruling was exquisitely uncomfo
rtable for the Tories since it turned one of their fundamental beliefs, in the unconditional nature of royal power, against their other, in the sanctity of the Church of England. And James’s subsequent exploitation of the judges’ ruling only impaled them on the horns of the dilemma more cruelly.

  James made the most of the intellectual quagmire in which the Tories found themselves. Their loyalty to the monarchy, they said, was unlimited, and they preached against any form of resistance. How far could this be pushed? James was convinced that Protestantism flourished in England only because it had banished religious truth by monopolizing education. If Catholic thinkers were only given equality with Protestants, the country, he believed, would learn that they had been lied to, and that the truth resided in Roman Catholicism. Then his mission of conversion would be possible. He therefore ordered the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, to elect a Catholic master. The fellows had vowed to obey their king in everything. Now they were being ordered to break the law of the land and their own college’s statutes and acquiesce in the destruction of the Anglican monopoly on education. They refused James’s order, arguing that it was illegal. The king, outraged that his loyal churchmen should defy him, went in person to Oxford. ‘Is this your Church of England loyalty?’ he demanded of them. ‘… Get you gone, know I am your King. I will be obeyed and I command you to be gone.’

  James did not understand or affected not to understand the distinction that Anglicans were beginning to make between resistance and obedience. Although they had sworn oaths not to rebel against the king, many were coming to believe that this did not necessarily mean that they were obliged to aid James’s policies. Moreover, this was especially true when they felt that he was breaking the law. They believed that this was not just a matter of letting a handful of Catholics serve as army officers or academics, but rather that it presaged a full-scale assault on the Church, the laws and the nation itself.

  For James saw the dispensing power, which enabled him to exempt individual Catholics from the Test Act on a case-by-case basis, simply as a first step. Instead, his Holy Grail was to secure a recognition of the suspending power, which would enable him to abrogate the laws against Catholics (and Protestant dissenters too) in their entirety. This would have the effect of the king’s repealing, unilaterally, legislation that had been agreed by all three elements of the Crown-in-Parliament – king, Lords and Commons.

  French kings could do this, as Louis XIV had shown with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. English kings could not. They were supposed to seek the consent of their subjects and respect the permanence of the law. But if any English king had the potential to go down the path of French absolutism, it was James, with his ample tax revenues, his standing army, his iron will and his sense of divine mission. England was at a dividing of the ways.

  James chose his ground with care. First he issued the Declaration of Indulgence, which tried to press all the right buttons. It invoked the ‘more than ordinary providence’ by which Almighty God had brought him to the throne; and it offered universal religious toleration as a guarantee of Dutch-style economic prosperity as opposed to Louis XIV-style religious persecution, which ‘spoiled trade, depopulated countries and discouraged strangers’.

  It was powerful bait. But would the Church of England be prepared to sell its monopoly position for a mess of pottage?

  On 27 April 1688, James ordered the clergy to read the Declaration of Indulgence from their pulpits. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, who, only three years before, had crowned James in the magnifi-cent ceremony at Westminster Abbey, summoned his fellow bishops to a secret supper party at Lambeth, where seven of them signed a petition to the king against the Declaration.

  In it, the bishops contrived both to have their Tory cake and to eat Whig principles. On the one hand, they invoked ‘our Holy Mother the Church of England [which was] both in her principles and her practice unquestionably loyal [to the monarchy]’, and, on the other, they argued like good Whigs that ‘the Declaration was founded on a dispensing power as hath often been declared illegal in Parliament’.

  It was a frontal – and, as the petition was soon circulated in print – public challenge to royal authority.

  James determined to slap the bishops down by prosecuting them for seditious libel. But the bishops showed unexpected courage and a surprising flair for public relations. First, they stressed their loyalty. When James accused them of rebellion they recoiled in horror. ‘We rebel! We are ready to die at your Majesty’s feet,’ said one bishop. ‘We put down the last rebellion, we shall not raise another.’ Then, by refusing to raise securities for bail, they got themselves imprisoned (rather briefly) in the Tower. It was a terrific coup: crowds of Londoners cheered them from the riverbanks as they were taken there by water; the soldiers of the garrison received them on their knees and the governor treated them as honoured guests.

  Even more importantly, the bishops’ trial, in the huge space of Westminster Hall, turned into a public argument about the legality of the dispensing power itself. Decorum broke down as the spectators cheered counsel for the bishops and booed and hissed the royal lawyers, and even the judicial worm turned against the king as one of the bench declared in his summing up that, if the dispensing power were allowed, ‘there will need no Parliament; all the legislature will be in the king, which is a thing worth considering’.

  ‘I leave the issue to God and your consciences,’ he concluded to the jury. The jurors stayed out all night in continuous deliberation. Then, the following morning, they returned the verdict: ‘Not guilty’.

  Instead, it was James’s government which had been condemned.

  III

  James II’s zealous desire to legitimize Catholicism in England had brought him into open conflict with Parliament, the bishops and now the courts. But it was an unexpected event that took place at St James’s Palace which finally brought matters to a head, an event that would under other circumstances have been an occasion for national rejoicing. Mary of Modena, James’s second, Catholic wife, came from famously fertile stock. And she duly conceived frequently. But all the babies either miscarried or died in infancy, leaving James’s Protestant daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne, as his heirs presumptive.

  In the late summer of 1687, however, James went on pilgrimage to Holywell while Mary took the waters at Bath. Both medicine and magic seemed to work, and in December her pregnancy was officially confirmed. James was elated. The Jesuit monks who surrounded the pregnant queen promised that she would give birth to a boy. Now, with a Catholic heir on the way, the programme of converting the country could be continued long into the future.

  The news was a disaster for English Protestants. There was sheer disbelief that the pregnancy could be genuine. Surely it must be another Catholic plot to subvert the laws and religion of the country? And the most important among these disbelievers were the members of James’s own, Protestant first family: his daughters Mary and Anne and his sonin-law, William of Orange. William had expected that his wife Mary would eventually inherit the throne, thus bringing England on to his side in his struggle against Catholic France. They were now, by the pregnancy, to be dispossessed and disappointed.

  Anne, who was still resident at her father’s court despite her marriage to Prince George of Denmark, had also taken a hearty dislike to her stepmother’s airs and graces when she became queen. Now she played a key role in endorsing and disseminating the malicious rumours about her pregnancy. It all looked suspiciously trouble free. Mary of Modena was too well. James, bearing in mind his wife’s previous disastrous gynaeco-logical history, was too confident. And he was too confident in particular that he would have a son.

  Anne wrote to her sister Mary to tell her that the queen was only pretending to be pregnant. There was, she said, ‘much reason to believe it a false belly’. Even so, the supposedly fake pregnancy ran its full course. The queen’s pains began at St James’s on the morning of 10 June 1688, and, after a short labour
impeded only by the crowd of witnesses crammed into her bedchamber, she gave birth at about 10 a.m.

  The baby, christened James Francis after his father and maternal uncle, was indeed the prophesied boy, and once his doctors had stopped feeding him with a spoon on a gruel made of water, flour and sugar, flavoured with a little sweet wine, and allowed him human milk from a wet-nurse, he was healthy and destined to live.

  But was he the king and queen’s child or a changeling?

  Normally, the birth of a prince of Wales would have crowned James’s attempt to reassert royal authority and re-Catholicize England. When, for instance, such an attempt had been made a century before, under Mary Tudor, it had been shipwrecked by the queen’s failure to produce a child and so guarantee the permanence of her legacy. But the birth of James Francis had the opposite effect. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic succession, James’s opponents decided that they could tolerate the course of his government no longer. Before the birth of a healthy prince, at least James’s actions were reversible when his solidly Protestant daughter, with her husband William at her side, came to the throne. But now they must instead bring him to heel or even bring him down.

  The first step was to develop the rumours about the queen’s pregnancy into a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of James Francis. The pregnancy, the story went, had been suppositious all along, as Anne had said, and therefore the child must be a changeling, smuggled into the queen’s bed in a warming-pan by the cunning Jesuits after a carefully stage-managed performance of childbirth. It was all nonsense, of course. But Princess Anne believed it. She persuaded her sister Mary in the Netherlands to believe it. And her brother-in-law, William of Orange, found it convenient to believe it too.

  By 1688, William, now in his late thirties, was a hardened general and politician. But his goal to unite the Netherlands and England in a Protestant crusade against the overweening Catholic power of Louis XIV’s France remained unchanged. Bearing in mind his position as both James’s nephew and son-in-law, he had every reason to suppose that Mary would inherit England naturally. But James’s Catholicizing policies and, still worse, the birth of a Catholic son and heir threatened to rob him of the prize. William would not let it go without a struggle.