Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  Throughout this year, and the first half of the next, negotiations between the two kings continued in absolute secrecy. The English ambassador in Paris, and the French ambassador in London, were not informed. Charles’s anti-Catholic ministers were not told. The king continued negotiations with the Dutch as if nothing in the world had changed. By late summer or early autumn 1669, Charles and Louis reached agreement. Louis would come to Charles’s aid whenever the English king announced his Catholicism, and the two would join together in an assault upon the Dutch.

  Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, arrived at Dover in the middle of May 1670, with diverse documents from the French court that she gave to her brother. Among these was a secret paragraph which read that ‘the king of England, being convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion, is resolved to declare it, and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the state of his country’s affairs permit’. Charles hoped and believed that the majority of his subjects had such affection for him that they would not protest ‘but as there are unquiet spirits who mask their designs under the guise of religion, the king of England, for the peace of his kingdom, will avail himself of the assistance of the king of France’. The king was still engaged in subterfuge against his most intimate councillors. He allowed Buckingham, for example, to negotiate a version of the treaty that did not contain this important paragraph concerning the king’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Instead he was asked to press on with a treaty of alliance that made no mention of the secret. He was not aware of the collusion. It is unlikely that Charles ever had any intention of announcing his conversion, however, and the commitment was in large part a ploy to bind the French king more tightly to him.

  The financial reward granted to the king was not large. He was to be paid £140,000 – half in advance – as a token of the French king’s favour. He was also to be paid approximately £210,000 during each year of the proposed war with the Dutch, with the first instalment to be sent to him three months before the actual declaration of hostilities. The king of England had become a pensionary of the king of France, and had in effect sold his sovereignty. Another difficulty was apparent. If the French king should ever release into the world the secret paragraph, Charles’s hold over his subjects might be destroyed; so Louis had a potent weapon in any confrontation with his fellow sovereign.

  The counterfeit treaty was signed towards the close of the year, while the secret agreement reached earlier in the spring was not revealed even to the king’s confidants. The alliance with Louis against the Dutch, however, could not be concealed for ever. The popular sentiment against France was already very strong, and the Venetian ambassador commented that ‘although the king may join France, his subjects will not follow him’. A rumour was spread that French agents were kidnapping English children to take their blood as a cure for Louis’s supposed leprosy. It was clear to the king’s men that, if there was to be a war with the Dutch, it would have to be very short and very successful before public anger turned against them.

  Yet how was any proposed war to be financed? In the intervals between various recesses and prorogations, parliament voted only modest supplies. The French pension itself was not over-generous. The king’s own hereditary revenues were all pledged to repay old debts but, as a sign of boldness or desperation, it was determined to postpone the repayment of all those loans. This became known as ‘the stop’, imposed on 2 January 1672. All payments due from the exchequer were cancelled, so that incoming revenues could be spent upon the preparations for war.

  The principal victims were the goldsmiths operating as bankers, who in turn passed on the loss and refused to discharge to their clients the cash they held on deposit. It seemed that ‘the stop’ might also soon be put to trade itself. Yet another casualty, however, was the king, who at a stroke lost credibility; the financial probity of the government was severely undermined and it was not at all clear that anyone would lend to it again. One contemporary confided to his diary that the decision ‘will amaze all men and ruin thousands’.

  In the spring of 1672, the French declared war on the Dutch; Charles immediately followed their example, and justified hostilities by citing the attempts of the republic to supplant English trade and to harass English traders. He also mentioned the fact that he was personally insulted by Dutch caricatures and publications. Two days before the call to war, Charles had honoured another undertaking to Louis by issuing a ‘declaration of indulgence’ that included his Catholic subjects. The nonconformists were granted complete freedom of worship while the Roman Catholic ‘recusants’ were permitted to worship in their private houses. It was a signal use of the royal prerogative at a time when parliament was not in session. Licences to hold public meetings were now generously and variously distributed to the nonconformists. John Bunyan was one of those released from prison. It may also have occurred to dissenters and Catholics that their new religious liberties now depended upon royal favour.

  The measure could also have been designed to assist the king’s brother, who had recently been received into the Catholic communion. James, duke of York, by his own account, had been converted after reading certain tracts for and against the Roman faith; he also perused church histories and came to the conclusion that none of the English reformers ‘had power to do what they did’. His faith was a matter of conviction and principle; for his brother it was a question of expediency.

  It was said by the earl of Arlington that the ‘declaration of indulgence’ was so intended ‘that we might keep all quiet at home while we are busy abroad’. Yet hostilities had already begun. In the middle of March an English squadron attempted to detain and board a rich Dutch fleet of merchant vessels on its way home from Smyrna and Malaga. Its commander had been warned in advance, however, and was accompanied by a convoy that allowed him to elude the English enemy. It was a humiliation for Charles, who had also been deprived of the treasure he had hoped to capture. The affair did not bode well for the greater war.

  The duke of York had been appointed as lord high admiral, but Charles played a large part in preparing and arming the fleet. In the early summer of 1672 an inconclusive battle took place near Sole Bay, off the coast of Suffolk, in which both sides claimed success. Since the original plan of the English was to sail across the North Sea and blockade the Dutch in their home ports, they could hardly be described as the victors. It was clear enough that this would be no easy fight for the seas. The French fleet, ostensibly present to aid their allies, had played no part in the battle and thus earned the angry rebukes of the English; soon enough, in popular opinion, the French would be far more hated than the Dutch. John Evelyn observed in his diary entry for 27 June that the inconclusive battle ‘showed the folly of hazarding so brave a fleet, and losing so many good men, for no provocation but that the Hollanders exceeded us in industry, and in all things but envy’.

  The armies of Louis XIV had more success. They poured across the Rhine in the first two weeks of June and attacked the territories of the United Provinces; there seemed no possibility of withstanding their advance, and some of the principal cities were obliged to open their gates to the invaders. The fires from the French camps could be seen from Amsterdam. Of the seven republics of the United Provinces, only Holland and Zealand remained unconquered. At this perilous juncture the Dutch opened their dykes and flooded the country to prevent any further French advance. The land war came to a peremptory halt.

  Charles had asked for a further £1 million from the French king, for the maintenance of the war, but Louis had refused. So Charles had no choice but to recall parliament in the hope of obtaining funds. Parliament returned in February 1673. In its absence a war had been declared and a declaration of religious indulgence had been issued. It might have seemed superfluous to requirements, except that it knew its power over the raising of money. The king had hoped to meet its members after a successful campaign against the Dutch, but that possibility had been removed.

  A new lord chancellor had become
the king’s official spokesman in the lords. The earl of Shaftesbury would soon become the most controversial man in the kingdom but, in these years, he was one of the most vigorous supporters of the royal prerogative; Charles would eventually describe him as ‘the weakest and wickedest man of the age’ but at this time he relied upon his judgement as an administrator and adviser. Shaftesbury had been an enthusiastic supporter of Oliver Cromwell, and even a member of the Barebone’s Parliament, but by dint of eloquence and industry he had managed to exorcize his interesting past. He would in turn inspire one of the most powerful pieces of satirical verse when he was denounced by John Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel:

  For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;

  Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit:

  Restless, unfixt in principles and place;

  In pow’r unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace.

  A fiery soul which, working out its way,

  Fretted the pigmy-body to decay.

  Parliament met in an unsettled and fractious mood. It was angry in particular that the king had seen fit to issue a declaration of religious indulgence without obtaining its consent; his action was deemed to be unconstitutional. Parliament was not necessarily opposed to the Dutch war but, if it was to vote supplies for the continuation of hostilities, its authority must be reasserted. The Commons then passed a resolution that parliamentary statutes concerning religion could not be suspended or cancelled except by Act of Parliament, thus denying the king’s power in matters of ‘indulgence’.

  Charles tried to resist with the help of the Lords but, in desperate need of money, eventually he submitted. After a number of rancorous exchanges he cancelled the declaration of indulgence and said that ‘what had been done with respect to the suspension of the penal laws should never be drawn into consequence’. The king broke the seal of the original declaration with his own hands. Bonfires were lit in the streets of London and, by the end of the month, Charles had received the supply of funds he so badly needed.

  Parliament had taken aim at papists rather than dissenters, since the Catholic recusants were still believed to pose a threat to the state. Abednego Seller, in The History of Passive Obedience, suggested that ‘treason in papists is like original sin to mankind; they all have it in their natures, though many of them may deny it, or not know it’. Some members believed that the ‘declaration’ had in fact been part of a papist plot concocted by Charles and Louis to impose that religion upon England.

  So in March 1673, the Commons passed a measure that became known as the Test Act. All aspirants to office or to a place of trust were to swear the oath of royal supremacy as well as the oath of allegiance, thus placing king before pope; they were also obliged to take the sacrament according to the rite of the Church of England and to swear that ‘I declare that I believe there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’. This struck at the heart of Catholic belief. When the king gave his assent to the Test Act a ‘great hum’ of approval arose in parliament. Charles was heard to say that he would now purge his court of all Catholics except his barber, ‘whom he mean[s] to keep in despite of all their bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand’. The remark had a point; the king trusted the Catholic who put a razor to his throat.

  The first casualty was James, duke of York, who was obliged to retire from public life. He resigned as lord high admiral and command of the fleet was entrusted to Prince Rupert, who last appeared in these pages as the leader of the royalist cavalry during the Civil War. It was therefore advertised to the world that the king’s brother and heir apparent was a Roman Catholic; immediately rumour and innuendo began to surround him. It was widely believed, for example, that the lord chancellor himself, the earl of Shaftesbury, was plotting against him in an effort to exclude him from the throne. When James did not receive communion with his brother in the royal chapel John Evelyn wrote in his diary that it ‘gave exceeding grief and scandal to the whole nation, that the heir of it, and the son of a martyr for the Protestant religion, should apostatize. What the consequence of this will be, God only knows, and wise men dread.’

  One of the king’s principal councillors and one of the original ‘cabal’, Thomas Clifford, also resigned all of his posts. He was a secret Catholic, and it had been suggested that the Test Act was in part formulated by his rivals precisely in order to remove him from office. He died soon after. Confidence now flowed to yet another of Charles’s ministers. Thomas Osborne, soon to become the earl of Danby, was a staunch Anglican who had opposed the Dutch war; he had also been a signal success as an administrator and, on Clifford’s resignation, he was appointed to be lord treasurer.

  The preparation for another year of hostilities with the Dutch was not undertaken with any great enthusiasm; the discovery of James’s Catholicism called into further question the alliance with papist France and the attack upon a fellow Protestant state. The king himself is reported to have been vacillating and inconsistent, ready to prosecute war on one day and ready to retire from conflict on the next. Shaftesbury said of his master that ‘there is not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence in his word or friendship’.

  In July Charles ordered Rupert to avoid any naval confrontation unless he could be sure to win it decisively. He had already returned to negotiations with the Dutch, and simply wished to apply pressure upon them. No such clear outcome emerged from the last sea battle of the war, the battle of the Texel, when the Dutch and English vessels fought a long and inconclusive struggle that left the waters filled with wreckage and floating bodies. It was notable, also, for the inactivity of the French fleet that simply stood apart and watched. Prince Rupert wrote later of the French admiral’s reluctance to become involved that ‘it wanted neither signal nor instruction to tell him what he should then have done; the case was so plain to every man’s eye in the whole fleet’. It was now believed by many that Louis XIV was happy to watch the two maritime nations destroy one another’s navies, thus adding more fire to the anger of the English against their nominal allies.

  James increased the anti-Catholic bias of the nation by taking advantage of the parliamentary recess to betroth himself to a papist princess. His previous wife, Anne Hyde, had died two years earlier, leaving him with two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. The new bride was of quite another nature. Mary of Modena was fifteen but already a devout Catholic, and it was reported that the French king highly approved of the match and might even provide a dowry for the occasion. The imminent prospect of a royal Catholic dynasty was not one that the English favoured. When Mary eventually arrived in England she was generally greeted with sullen silence by the populace. When she was allowed to sit in the queen’s presence, the English ladies ‘humped’ and walked out.

  When parliament reconvened towards the end of October 1673, the outcry against the marriage was immediate. Sir William Temple declared that the effort to defeat papistry with the Test Act would come to nothing ‘if it got footing so near the throne’ and he begged the king to forbid the proposed match. A resolution to that effect was almost unanimously approved.

  A broader assault upon the administration now began. Some of the members had already stated that they would not vote a penny more for the war unless and until they had a voice in its management. A resolution to that effect was amended with the proviso that no money should be granted until the previous supply of war funds had been collected. It was also found necessary to give room for a debate on ‘grievances’, principal among them the French alliance and the war against the Dutch. At the beginning of November it was declared that the standing army was also a ‘grievance’, perhaps not the most appropriate note to be struck during a war. On 5 November the old sport of pope-burning returned to the streets, when the effigy of Pope Clement X was set on fire by the London apprentices. A figure of a Frenchman was also used for target practice.


  Charles was aware that his lord chancellor, the earl of Shaftesbury, had helped to foment opposition against his brother and that he was steadily becoming the leading spokesman for the Protestant interest. So he dismissed him from his councils, and appointed Heneage Finch as lord chancellor; it was reported that the king changed his mind six times, in as many hours, over the appointment. The Venetian envoy reported to the doge and senate that ‘the king calls a cabinet council for the purpose of not listening to it, and the ministers hold forth in it so as not to be understood’.

  Shaftesbury did not go quietly, however, and against the king’s direct order remained in London to recruit allies for his anti-Catholic cause; for the rest of his political life he would organize the opposition to the king. When parliament met again at the beginning of 1674, after a brief prorogation, the attack moved on to the king’s principal ministers who were ‘popishly affected, or otherwise obnoxious and dangerous’. Lauderdale had ruled on the king’s behalf in Scotland, and was accused of favouring absolutism; it was resolved therefore that the king should remove him from ‘all his employments and from the royal presence and councils for ever’.

  The duke of Buckingham was next to be arraigned and agreed to speak before the Commons; he tried to excuse himself by shifting the blame onto the ineptitude of others, and declared that ‘I can hunt the hare with a pack of hounds but not with a pack of lobsters’. It was widely believed that the lobsters in question were the king and his brother. His wit did not impress the Commons, however, and it was determined that he should also be removed from all of his employments. Buckingham later complained that ‘men ruined by their princes and in disgrace are like places struck with thunder; it is accounted unlawful to approach them’.

  Arlington was then in turn impeached for treason and crimes of high misdemeanour, but his case was ceded to a special committee. The ‘cabal’ had in any case now been dissolved. It was obvious to everyone that the king was ready to sacrifice ministers when he had no further use for them.