The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  A year had passed since James issued his Declaration of Liberty of Conscience, and few in England now doubted that the King was intent on imposing a new religion on his country. Catholics swarmed at court. The King used increasingly forceful methods to win his compliant parliament. In December, coffee house readers of the Gazette learned that the King had decided to review Deputy-Lieutenants and magistrates, retaining only those who supported repeal of the Test, and promoting others ‘from whom his Majesty may reasonably expect the like concurrence and assistance’.2 All over England Corporations had their charters withdrawn by the process of quo warranto and were repeatedly remodelled until they attained the right political complexion.

  Catholicism or war seemed the only alternatives for England. As if to prepare for war, James had written to William of Orange in January requesting the return of the six English and Scottish regiments which were stationed in the United Provinces in Dutch pay (a legacy of Elizabeth’s role in the Dutch struggle against Spain). It was fortunate, perhaps, that few knew of James’s plan to send one regiment to France as ‘a nursery to educate and form Catholic soldiers’.3 In fact, his plan had backfired. The States-General prevaricated as only they knew how; Catholic officers in the regiments returned home, leaving behind a hard core of ‘Crumwellians [who] were never more animated against the King’4 – in the assessment of James’s new Catholic ambassador to the Hague, an Irish adventurer called Ignatius White who bore the improbable Spanish title of Marquis d’Albeville and exemplified James’s eye for shifty mediocrity.

  The failure to repatriate the six regiments was not the only setback for the King. James could no longer entirely depend on the loyalty of the armed forces he did command. One naval officer warned James against appointing too many ‘Popish Officers’ for ‘he was sure that the seamen would knock them on the head’.5 As for his plan to concoct a loyal parliament, ‘rapid motion without advancing a step’ was Halifax’s verdict. Van Citters, the Dutch ambassador, reported Corporations being remodelled ‘two or three times in one month’6 without noticeable effect. There was no sign of the oil-and-water mix of Dissenters and Catholics emulsifying into an effective political blend. The Queen’s pregnancy, meanwhile, was received in most quarters with open disbelief, as the Earl of Clarendon discovered when he attended church on the official day of thanksgiving. ‘There were not above two or three on the church who brought the form of prayer with them’, he wrote in his diary. ‘It is strange to see how the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true. Good God help us!’7

  All of this suggested an extraordinary degree of political stubbornness in the King’s decision to reissue his Declaration of Liberty of Conscience a year after it was first proclaimed. ‘The Politicians are quite at a loss’, Ambassador van Citters reported,

  ‘to explain what reasons may have induced his Ma: to make this declaration, according to their judgement so ill-timed and contrary to custom ... from which they foresee nothing else, but that his Ma: has exposed himself unnecessarily to the cabal and criticism of the nation, and instead of gaining by it, has prejudiced his designs.’8

  It was still more unfortunate that James chose Church of England ministers as the messengers of this new proclamation. They, of course, were the main target of the message. James decreed that the Declaration of Liberty of Conscience be read from every Anglican pulpit on two consecutive Sundays – 20 and 27 May in London, and (to give time for the order to spread) 3 and 10 June elsewhere. Hence Bishop Sprat’s appearance in Westminster Abbey. William Legge, son of the Earl of Dartmouth, was a Westminster schoolboy at the time, and remembered both the tremor in Thomas Sprat’s hands, and the congregation’s reaction:

  ‘As soon as Bishop Sprat ... gave order for reading it, there was so great a murmur and noise in church, that nobody could hear him: but before he had finished, there was none left but a few prebends in their stalls, the choristers, and Westminster scholars.’9

  Sprat was a loyalist; he had even taken on the administration of Henry Compton’s diocese. It was not surprising that he should enforce the King’s command – but few others followed his lead. Why on earth should the clergy ‘tell men that they needed not to come to church except when they pleased?’10 One minister announced to his congregation that though he had to read it, they didn’t have to listen, and waited till they had gone before intoning James’s declaration to an empty church. Requested to read out their own death warrants, the Anglican clergy refused en masse.

  This was a Tory rebellion and, to the King’s fury it came from the very top. Senior bishops and Tory politicians dined at Lambeth Palace the week before the declaration was due to be read, among them Clarendon, who recorded in his diary the decision to defy the King. The timid, elderly Archbishop had decided to draw a line. On the Friday before the declaration was due to be read, a group of bishops attended James in his closet. Since Archbishop Sancroft was banned from the court because of his refusal to join the Ecclesiastical Commission, it was the Bishop of St Asaph who presented the King with a petition against the declaration, on the grounds that it was illegal for him to declare Liberty of Conscience without the consent of Parliament.

  The following extraordinary conversation then took place:

  KING This is a great surprise to me: here are strange words. I did not expect this from you; especially from some of you. This is a standard of rebellion.

  The bishops pleaded they would shed blood rather than lift a finger against him.

  KING I tell you, this is a standard of rebellion. I never saw such an address.

  The bishops begged him to withdraw the word; they would never rebel.

  PETERBOROUGH Sir, you will allow liberty of conscience to all mankind: the reading this Declaration is against our conscience.

  KING I will keep this paper. It is the strangest address which I ever saw: it tends to rebellion. Do you question my dispensing power? Some of you here have printed and preached for it, when it was for your purpose.

  PETERBOROUGH Sir, what we say of the dispensing power refers only to what was declared in Parliament.

  KING The dispensing power was never questioned by the men of the Church of England.

  ST ASAPH It was declared against in the first parliament called by his late Majesty, and by that which was called by your Majesty.

  KING Is this what I have deserved of you, who have supported the Church of England, and will support it? I will remember you that have signed this paper: I will keep this paper; I will not part with it. I did not expect this from you; especially from some of you: I will be obeyed in publishing my Declaration.

  BATH & WELLS God’s will be done!

  KING What is that?

  BATH & WELLS } God’s will be done!

  PETERBOROUGH }

  KING If I think fit to alter my mind, I will send to you. God hath given me this dispensing power, and I will maintain it. I tell you, there are seven thousand men, and of the Church of England too, that have not bowed their knees to Baal.11

  That was not the end of the matter. Three weeks later, after a large part of the Anglican clergy had defied the Crown, all seven bishops were summoned to a meeting of the Privy Council. It was four o’clock in the afternoon of 8 June and a copy of the petition lay on the table. The Archbishop of Canterbury was asked if it was his. Sancroft said:

  ‘Sir, I am called hither as a criminal; which I never was before in my life, and little thought I ever should be, especially before your Majesty: but, since it is my unhappiness to be so at this time, I hope your Majesty will not be offended, that I am cautious of answering questions.’12

  Roger North, his legal adviser, must have coached him on his rights. But when the King pressed him ‘with some impatience’, Sancroft agreed to answer – provided he could do so without prejudice. Since James appeared to accept this, Sancroft conceded authorship of the document. Reneging on his agreement, the King then had the Archbishop of Canterbury and six leading bi
shops arrested and charged with contriving, making and publishing a seditious*§ libel against His Majesty and His Government.

  There followed much legal confusion. The accused would normally enter into a form of bail. The bishops refused to do this, asking instead ‘to be proceeded against in the common way’.13 About half past seven, they were taken into custody by a Sergeant-at-Arms, and transported to the Tower in the Archbishop’s barge.

  Anti-Catholic feeling had been running at fever pitch that summer. Comparisons were stirred up again between James and Bloody Mary; Popish flames leapt into the air. And now the Church of England had seven new martyrs. By the time the barge reached Tower Wharf, vast crowds were gathering to show their support. ‘Wonderful was the concern of the people for them’, wrote John Evelyn, a personal friend of Archbishop Sancroft. ‘Infinite crowds of people on their knees, begging their blessing & praying for them as they passed out of the barge; along the Tower wharf &c.’14‡

  James had fallen back on his old instinct: yield no ground. In his memoirs he admitted that ‘his prepossession against that yielding temper which had proved so dangerous to the King his brother and so fatal to the King his father’ might have ‘fixed him too obstinately in a contrary method’.15 The word obstinately was underlined by his son. James could not have chosen a worse moment to apply his father’s lesson. Two days later, the Queen went into labour.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon of 10 June, John Evelyn heard the sudden boom of cannons, and bells began one by one to ring all over London. Mary of Modena had given birth to a healthy son.

  He would be called James, like his father. £12,000 of fireworks were set off in celebration on 17 June. ‘The public joy’, gushed the Gazette, splendidly confusing cause and effect, ‘was expressed by the conduits running with wine, by bonfires, ringing of bells, and all other ways by which the people could demonstrate their dutiful affection to their Majesties, and the sense they have of this great blessing.’16

  The Gazette did not tell the whole story, however. St Giles-in-the-Fields was the church whose Rector, John Sharp, had precipitated Henry Compton’s ejection. That morning, Roger Morrice heard, the congregation

  ‘were all silent when the prayers appointed for that day for the King and Queen and Prince were read, and did not begin to answer again until the reader had said 8 or 10 periods in the common prayer book ... Very many very rudely and indecently laughed or smiled one upon another, or talked one with another.’17

  Evelyn and Pepys watched a second display of fireworks from Pepys’s window when the Queen arose from her bed. Evelyn thought them ‘spent too soon, for so long a preparation’,18 as fireworks always are. Not even James could delude himself that the national rejoicing was sincere. But at least he had his Catholic heir.

  Or had he? On the day of thanksgiving for the Queen’s pregnancy, a mock proclamation had been found on a church pillar ordering that ‘thanks should be given to God, for the Queen’s being great with a cushion’.19 Edmund Bohun got back to town just a few days after the birth, and a friend advised him:

  ‘not to speak anything of the Prince’s birth; for that I should be whipped at a cart’s tail if I did.’

  ‘“Why”, said I, “have they managed their business so as to have his birth questioned?”’

  ‘“Yes”, said my monitor; who was, aftèr that, a great Jacobite.’

  ‘I must confess, this startled me; but the more, when he came to be prayed for in the church, when I saw the women look sideways of their fans and laugh one upon another.’20

  James was paying the price for twenty-eight years of illegitimate Stuart children, affairs, scandals. Rumour became the quicksand in which his monarchy would drown. Later in the year, like Canute trying to hold back the waves, he would be forced to issue a Proclamation Against Rumours. Whatever details he published, tentacles of rumour coiled around them and uprooted them. The Queen had never allowed anyone to see her getting dressed, it was said; her belly had grown unnaturally fast. The (slightly) premature birth was suspicious because Princess Anne was out of town, and could not be there as a witness. Princess Anne herself, the King’s frivolous and malicious younger daughter, did everything she could to stir up this storm. ‘Whenever I happened to be in the room,’ she wrote to her sister in Holland, ‘she has always gone in the next room to put on her smock.’21 She repeated so often the complaint that the Queen hadn’t let her feel her belly that her uncle, the Earl of Clarendon, eventually asked,

  ‘If the queen had at other times of her being with child* bid her [feel her belly]?’

  ‘She answered, “No, that is true.”’

  ‘“Why then, madam,” said I, “should you wonder, she did not bid you do it this time?”’

  ‘“Because”, said she, “of the reports.”’

  ‘“Possibly,” [said her uncle, exasperation finally boiling over], “she did not mind the reports.”’22

  In despair James would be driven to publish the depositions, on oath, of everyone who had been present at the birth. Nothing could have been more humiliating to a woman of the Queen’s ‘proud haughty humour’; nothing could better illustrate the distrust James’s subjects felt for him. In coffee houses, in markets, in corner shops, people would read that the King and Queen had had sex twice the previous autumn, on Tuesday 6 September, and Thursday 6 October. They read every detail of the labour – always an ordeal in the seventeenth century and never more so, it turned out, than when you were Queen of England. At least forty-two people were watching Mary as she gave birth, including one whose face must have been even less welcome to a woman in labour than it was to a criminal in court: George Jeffreys. ‘When she was in great pain, the King called in haste for the Lord Chancellor, who came up to the bedside to shew he was there; upon which the rest of the privy-counsellors did the same thing. Then the Queen desired the King to hide her face with his head and periwig, which he did, for she said she could not be brought to bed and have so many men look on her; for all the council stood close at the bed’s feet, and Lord Chancellor upon the step.’23 At the moment of birth, the Queen ‘cried out extremely, and said, “Oh, I die; you kill me, you kill me.”’

  ‘“Where is the King gone?”’

  ‘His Majesty came immediately from the other side of the bed (from just having a sight of the child) and answered the Queen, “Here I am.”’

  ‘The Queen said, “Why do you leave me now?”’

  And so on. Mrs Elizabeth Pearse, the queen’s laundress, described the foul linen she took away. The physician Sir Charles Scarborough, who found Mary ‘wearied and panting’, examined ‘the afterbirth reeking warm’. All this would be known to William Sancroft and Henry Compton, to Edmund Bohun and Roger North, to the exiles sitting in the Croom Elbow coffee house, to the carpenter John Markham and to John Whiting down in the West Country, to Isaac Newton and John Locke, to Jaques and Anne Elisabeth Fontaine.

  Still no one believed in the birth. ‘It could not have been more public if he had been born in Charing Cross’,24 stormed a loyalist, years later, as the controversy rumbled on. Rumour outflanked the King’s proofs at every stage. The baby had been smuggled into the chamber in a warming pan. The original baby had died and been substituted later. Gilbert Burnet gleefully recounted the tale of an apothecary called Hemings, ‘a very worthy man’, who lived in St Mary’s Lane, and one night heard his Catholic neighbours discussing the baby’s death and planning a substitute. The crisis of James’s monarchy would be fought out in fog, and there were plenty willing to thicken it. Urging a propaganda push against the ‘supposed Prince of Wales’, the Prince of Orange’s agent James Johnstone gave him advice which might have come from a modern spin-doctor:

  ‘Even those that believe that there is a trick put on the nation will be glad to know why they themselves think so, and those that only suspect the thing, will be glad to find reasons to determine them.’25

  In fact, only one thing had been made more certain by the birth of the Prince of Wales. Jame
s could not now retreat. His opponents faced Catholic monarchs in perpetuity; they no longer had the option of waiting patiently for Protestant Mary. If he was to make his Kingdom safe for a Catholic heir, James had no choice but to continue with his programme. Abandon his Catholic project now, and he would also have to abandon his son.

  Just five days after the Prince was born, the bishops were brought from the Tower for their initial hearing. ‘There was a lane of people,’ John Evelyn recorded, ‘from the King’s Bench to the waterside, upon their knees as the bishops passed and repassed, to beg their blessing.’ After three hours of legal wrangling the trial was fixed for St Peter and St Paul’s Day, 29 June, and the bishops were allowed to go home. They did not go quietly. ‘Passing along the river, thousands of people stood on each side, making great shouts, the bells rang, and people hardly knew what to do from joy.’26 That night bonfires were lit and bells rung, ‘which was taken very ill at court’.27 Thomas Sprat heard the bells of the Abbey ringing and hurried to have them stopped.

  Some at court, though, worried about the conjunction of the royal birth and a trial of strength with the Anglican Church. There were suggestions that James should use the birth as an excuse to issue a royal pardon. Even George Jeffreys told the Earl of Clarendon ‘he was much troubled at their prosecution’.28 He had every reason to be. When the day of the trial arrived, crowds surrounded Westminster Hall. James’s coronation feast had been held there just three years before; now his reign was widely felt to be on trial, in the hall where his father had been condemned to death. By seventeenth-century standards the ten hour trial was an extraordinarily protracted affair. The bishops had retained some of the most eminent legal counsel in England. Prosecution witnesses were brought to the Hall through back corridors. The Earl of Sunderland, who only the weekend before had made public his conversion to Catholicism, was hissed as he approached the bar. A spectator so unwise as to bow to him was ‘kicked ... on the breech so severely that he cried out, Oh!’29 Outside, in New Palace Yard, crowds clung to the railings, waiting for news. Roger Morrice may have had access to the defence team through an old friend, the veteran lawyer and politician Serjeant Maynard. All night long, rumours filtered out from the jury-room. ‘About three o’clock in the morning, they were overheard to be engaged in loud and eager debate.’ There was a rumour that one juror, a brewer who depended on the court for contracts, was holding out. At six o’clock the jury announced a decision had been reached, and a wave of excitement passed through the waiting crowd – but then it was reported that they would only reveal their finding in open court.