The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  Later, people would remember the Coronation Day’s mishaps. The crown almost fell off when Sancroft placed it on James’s head; a portrait of the King in Gracechurch Street fell and was smashed on the ground; the royal arms blew out of a standard at the Tower. All those looked like bad omens, afterwards. But to some it was astonishing this Coronation Day had even dawned, for five years earlier the House of Commons had passed a Bill to prevent James being crowned at all. Why? Because of one piece of ancient ceremonial which could not be counterfeited: the communion of the new King. James took his communion not in Anglican Westminster Abbey but in private with his Italian confessor. He had been anointed before the ceremony as well; the business with the ampulla was more sham. On St George’s Day 1685, England crowned a Catholic monarch for the first time since Bloody Mary.

  II

  ‘REBELS AND TRAITORS’

  Five years before that coronation Dudley North returned to his brothers’ house after an absence of fourteen years. Francis North was a senior lawyer (at James’s coronation he would process next to Archbishop Sancroft as Keeper of the Great Seal). Roger, twelve years younger than Dudley, was also beginning a legal career. The two of them stared in amazement from their doorstep in Covent Garden at an outlandish figure with Turkish moustaches, ‘cordubee hat and strange out of the way clothes’.1 Roger had only been eight years old when Dudley left, and his brother had made just one brief visit home since. When the first greetings were over, he capered wildly around the house bawling for a tailor to measure him up for some London clothes. He had a barber shave off his moustaches and laughed at his bare white upper lip in the mirror. Dudley had always been the black sheep of the family, and his love of risk had not worn off. Showing Dudley the new sights of London after his return, Roger took him up Wren’s new steeple at St Mary-le-Bow, where, too fat to squeeze between the columns, Dudley terrified his brother by swinging round outside them. That daredevil streak was the reason he had been packed off overseas to make a career in trade, and in the hubbub of reunion he told them about the fortune he had brought back with him, the bills of credit and potash, the exotic woods for cabinet-makers, most of all, the bales of silk. For London was an eager market for such luxuries. A new world was emerging from the mist around the borders of Europe, and Dudley had made a fortune from it.

  When the first excitement of homecoming was over, however, it was Francis’ and Roger’s turn to fill their brother in on affairs in England: the notorious ‘Popish Plot’ and the storm which had then broken over the exclusion of the Duke of York from the throne. ‘He found us almost ready to go together by the ears about public matters,’ Roger wrote later, ‘which soon settled in the terms of Whig and Tory.’2 In April 1680, Dudley had come home to England’s most serious constitutional crisis since the Civil Wars.

  The crisis had begun eighteen months earlier with the gruesome discovery, in an unfinished house in the new development of Soho, of a bloodstained sedan chair. On the same day, walkers on Primrose Hill discovered the body of one of London’s leading magistrates, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Godfrey had been garrotted and his body gruesomely transfixed with his own sword. Rumours about these finds quickly swirled around London, where the political temperature had been rising for some time. There followed a letter to Secretary of State William Coventry in which the writer, an adventurer and reformed Catholic called William Bedloe, claimed to have seen Godfrey’s body laid out on a table in Somerset House, the home of Charles II’s Catholic Queen, Catharine of Braganza. The magistrate had been killed five days earlier, he said, by a gang of Catholics. He had helped carry it to Primrose Hill himself, abandoning the sedan chair on the way. Bedloe’s revelations had induced panic, for Godfrey had been investigating a plot – a ‘damnable and hellish plot’, the House of Commons called it when they met to discuss his murder, ‘contrived and carried on by the Popish recusants for the assassinating and murdering of the King, and for subverting the government, and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion’. The evidence which Godfrey had been looking into came from a renegade former Catholic and defrocked navy chaplain whose high-pitched, fluting voice would never be forgotten by those he accused. His name was Titus Oates.

  Catholics filled the court. The King’s wife was a Catholic, as were his innumerable French mistresses. Catholics had burned down London in the terrible fire of 1666 – or so it was generally believed. They had burned the English bishops who filled Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It was easy enough for Protestants to believe they would attempt to seize power. Catholic loyalty – it was well known – was to their faith, not their country. That faith was far more than an alternative brand of worship. It was a hostile ideology, and Europe in 1678 was divided into two mutually incompatible camps. Indeed, for much of the past hundred years Catholic and Protestant had been at war, and a century of Protestant disasters had only increased English fears of Rome. The once-rampant reformed churches were now pinned back to a northern heartland where England (back to the wall not for the first or last time) was ‘the main bank that hinders the sea of Rome from overwhelming all Christian nations’.3 In 1678 the Dutch United Provinces had barely survived a six-year onslaught by the uncontested superpower of the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV’s France. The English lived with the sense of a tide rising to engulf them – even though their own tiny and beleaguered minority of Catholic recusants, excluded from government and subject to endless harassment and persecution, offered no threat to them at all.

  In Catholicism the English saw not just alien ritual, the ‘vestments, consecrations, exorcisms, whisperings, sprinklings, censings, and fantastical rites’,4 which Protestant writers loved to caricature. Catholicism brought with it the political creed of absolutism. ‘Lay Popery flat,’ was one common view, ‘and there’s an end of Arbitrary Government.’ By the late 1670s that link was axiomatic; Catholicism not only threatened English faith, it was poison to a whole English way of life. And Stuart Kings had let the poison enter England’s bloodstream before. Over the twinned issues of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ the nation had struggled through the traumas of Civil War and Commonwealth, and barely emerged intact. In 1678, England was still a weak and divided country – divided religiously, politically debilitated by constitutional crises which went back half a century and showed little sign of coming to an end. The execution of Charles I was a living memory, as was Cromwell’s dictatorship. There had been high hopes that the restoration of Charles II in 1660 would draw a line under this turmoil, but now, it seemed, the disease had appeared again. The bloodstained sedan chair in Soho Square, the fantastical, crude calumnies of Titus Oates were mere baroque decoration, pockmarks erupting to signal an infection deep in the blood. By 1678 Charles had failed to hold elections for eighteen years or to call his parliament for three. His initial religious tolerance had been succeeded by legislation, the ‘Clarendon Code’, to exclude England’s large minority of Dissenters (including Catholics) from government. In the eyes of old Puritans and many in the Church of England, the dominant figures in the Anglican Church – men like Archbishop Sancroft – were Catholics in all but name.

  An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England was the title Andrew Marvell gave to a pamphlet he published in 1677, the year before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey died.

  ‘There has now for divers years, a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant religion into down-right popery.’

  The charge against Charles exactly matched that made against his father in the run-up to the Civil War, while the future threatened still worse. Despite a healthy flock of bastards, Charles had no legitimate child. The heir to the throne, his younger brother, James Duke of York, was a convert to the Catholic faith.

  A visitor to the court described the King’s brother:

  ‘His complexion may be called light in colour, all the outlines of his face are prominent: a square forehead, the eyes l
arge, swollen and deep blue, the nose curved and rather large, the lips pale and thick, and the chin rather pointed.’5

  James’s carriage was ‘a little stiff and constrain’d’, his conversation mainly of horses and dogs; he was a military man. The happiest years of his life had been spent under Marshal Turenne crushing the Frondes challenges to royal power in France. He liked portraits that showed him in martial attitudes. From his time as Lord High Admiral, much was made of his victories over Dutch fleets at Lowestoft in 1665 and Sole Bay in 1672. There was no doubting James’s physical courage. At Sole Bay, three flagships were battered to hulks beneath him. Rather less was made of James’s tactical limitations in both (inconclusive) battles – or, indeed, of the disastrous Dutch raid on Chatham, which was blamed on subordinates. At both Lowestoft and Sole Bay the Duke showed inflexibility and a worrying failure to grasp the broader implications of events.

  On Easter Day 1672, craning, whispering courtiers had noticed that the Duke did not take Anglican communion. There had been rumours about his faith for some time. A year later those rumours were confirmed when he resigned his post as Lord High Admiral. James had converted to Rome, and England faced the prospect of a Catholic King. ‘It gave exceeding grief and scandal to the whole nation’, wrote John Evelyn, a fifty-three-year-old courtier, scholar and commentator on all novelties political, sacred and civil, ‘that the heir of it, and the son of a martyr for the Protestant religion, should apostatise. What the consequence of this will be, God only knows, and wise men dread.’6

  The soldier Duke saw in Catholicism a simple discipline for a world slipping into chaos. ‘Till they began the Schism [Reformation],’ he wrote later, ‘all was quiet as to religion in our unfortunate country, but since, all the world sees what disorders it has caused and how our islands have been over run with diversities of sects in the Church and with ruin and rebellion in the State.’7 Both his qualities – of inflexibility and courage – could be read into James’s conversion, the only unorthodox thing this most hidebound of men ever did. Yet having made his move, nothing would induce the Duke of York to return to his former church. ‘Except he became a Protestant,’ wrote the moderate Earl of Halifax as the crisis over the succession deepened, ‘his friends would be obliged to leave him, like a garrison one could no longer defend.’8 But James stuck to his guns, as he had at Sole Bay, while flagship after flagship was destroyed under him. ‘Pray once for all,’ he wrote to his friend George Legge, the future Earl of Dartmouth, ‘never say anything to me again of turning Protestant; do not expect it or flatter yourself that I shall ever be it; I never shall; and if occasion were, I hope God would give me grace to suffer death for the true Catholic religion, as well as banishment.’9

  James never found it easy to attract affection. Autocratic and insecure, impressive-looking but weak-willed, he would dither one moment and lay down the law the next. Self-loathing coloured his devotional papers; he was tormented by guilt about his obsessive womanising. He had great qualities, wrote one courtier, among them his courage and his seriousness, ‘yet heaven, it seems, hath found a way to make all this more terrible than lovely’.10 Laughing off assassination rumours in the midst of the Popish Plot crisis, Charles was reputed to have told his brother, ‘no man in England will take my life to make you King’.11

  That was exactly the accusation, however, which Titus Oates and William Bedloe whispered into the ears of a believing nation. They implicated James’s second wife, the beautiful Italian Mary of Modena; they found letters which a secretary had unwisely written to Louis XIV’s confessor, Pére la Chaise. They denounced Catholic Lords, Irish priests, even the Queen. All this was more than enough to reignite the fires of ‘ruin and rebellion’ which had been so briefly damped down by the Restoration.

  John Locke, an Oxford academic and doctor, was secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, the former minister who now co-ordinated the opposition. Locke was forty-six years old, a bachelor of austere appearance but companionable habits, so useful to Shaftesbury that the Earl ‘began soon to use him as a friend and consult with him on all occasions ... entrusted him with his secretest negotiations ... to raise that spirit in the nation which was necessary against the prevailing Popish party’.12 Exeter House, at the east end of the Strand, was the headquarters of the opposition – the ‘Whigs’ as they started to be known. There Locke met men who questioned the very basis on which kings wielded power – men like William Russell, a close ally of Shaftesbury, and the republican idealist Algernon Sidney. He met the radicals who were turning the City of London into a stronghold of opposition and dissent, like Sir Patience Ward, shortly to be elected mayor, and Thomas Papillon, cousin to Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and a close friend of Godfrey’s two merchant brothers.

  At the end of 1678, the old ‘Cavalier’ parliament was dissolved. Another parliament met in the New Year but was prorogued as soon as it raised the dangerous issue of the succession, and soon afterwards dissolved. Elections were held, but the new parliament was prorogued immediately. It was still in limbo when Dudley North returned to England in April 1680. The previous winter, his brothers told him, huge demonstrations had taken place in London. On 17 November 1679, crowds took to the streets around a vast wax effigy of the Pope. At the head of the procession came ‘the dead body of Sir Edmundberry Godfrey ... with spots of blood on his wrists and breast ... his face pale and wan, riding upon a white horse’.13 Behind the Pope were floats of cardinals, Jesuits and nuns, the latter shamelessly flaunting themselves like prostitutes. It was the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession and memories of Bloody Mary were strong. ‘Casting your eye towards Smithfield,’ screeched one preacher,

  ‘imagine you see your father, or your mother, or some of your nearest and dearest relations, tied to a stake in the midst of flames, when with eyes lifted up to heaven, they scream and cry out to that God for whose cause they die, which was a frequent spectacle the last time popery reigned amongst us.’14

  This far into the crisis the hatred of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ had gone beyond reasonable concern, even beyond bigotry; it had become a defining article of national identity. As the head of the Pope melted in a final shower of sparks, the crowds of people, some hanging from shop-signs around Temple Bar, were united not merely in what they believed but in what they were: Englishmen and Protestants.

  Sixteen thousand people signed a petition for Charles to recall Parliament, John Locke among them. London veered dangerously towards rebellion. Slingsby Bethel was said to have stood on the scaffold in an executioner’s vizard when Charles I was executed; now he was elected Sheriff – a ‘parallel line drawn to that of 1641–2’, in the eyes of Secretary of State Leoline Jenkins. James Duke of York was despatched by his brother first to Holland and then Scotland to lower the political temperature. By the time Dudley North returned to London, James’s exclusion from the throne was at the heart of the crisis. ‘If we do not do something relating to the succession,’ William Russell told the House of Commons, ‘we must resolve ... to be Papists, or burn.’15 In fact, James’s place in the succession was somewhat academic. He himself ‘never had the least fancy he should come to the Crown’;16 he was already forty-six and Charles seemed healthy. His wife, meanwhile, showed no sign of producing surviving heirs. The crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland were most likely to devolve on Mary, the eldest daughter of James’s first marriage,* who was not only Anglican herself, but had recently married the staunchest Protestant of them all, the Dutch Stadholder William of Orange. As the court’s leading autocrat and Papist, however, James encapsulated all the objections to Charles’s rule. And so parliaments battled over Bills to exclude the Duke, while radical Whigs applied their pens to a torrent of political literature which – like so much else – recalled the run-up to the first Civil War. ‘I fear a rebellion or something worse,’ wrote James, ‘for everything almost goes after the same manner as it did in the year ‘40.’17

  The crisis of 1678–83 shattered the illusion that the resto
ration had been a return to a status quo. What status quo? What powers could the King claim and on what basis had he returned? The Exclusion Crisis reopened the great unfinished debate about England’s future.

  One ingredient had changed. Even among the ‘fanatics’ at Exeter House there was no more talk of commonwealths. Instead, they had come up with an alternative heir to the throne. ‘No Pope’, chanted the crowds in December 1679. ‘No Papist. God Bless the King and the Duke of Monmouth.’ The claim of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest son, had only one defect. No one doubted that he was ‘descended from the loins of the most Renowned Monarch King Charles the Second ... by which royal extraction he is descended from the incomparably wise and virtuous Prince, the Royal Martyr Charles the First’.18 The problem for his followers was revealed by the baton sinister on his coat of arms. Monmouth’s mother was the first of Charles II’s many mistresses, the ‘brown, beautiful, bold but insipid’ Lucy Walter. Monmouth was illegitimate.