The 1679 election favoured the Whigs, who were determined to take the purge of Catholics to its natural conclusion and transfer the succession from Charles’s brother James to James, Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s illegitimate son by his mistress Lucy Walter. The King was appalled, as were the Tories, who objected on pragmatic and religious grounds. They convinced themselves that James’s private faith was no impediment to his governing his two Protestant kingdoms, and that human interference with the natural succession flouted the will of God. Moreover, and this ran harshly against the grain of Tory principles, the proposed Whig Exclusion Bill implied that Parliament reserved the right to decide who should wear the crown.
On this Charles was adamant. His minister George Savile, Earl of Halifax, warned the peers that, if he were denied the succession, then York would in all likelihood raise his fellow Catholics in Ireland and Scotland and civil war would follow. The Lords rejected the Exclusion Bill and the King called a second election at the end of 1679, in which he instructed his Lords Lieutenant to do all in their power to hinder Whig candidates.19
Taking the analogy of chess, Charles had deployed his bishops, castles and knights to check his opponents. Yet it was a deceptive victory, for the Lords, having preserved the right of succession, gave signal proof of its belief in a Catholic conspiracy by finding an aged Catholic peer, William Howard, fifth Viscount Stafford, guilty of treason. Eighty-six peers attended the trial and fifty-five judged him guilty, including several of his kinsmen. John Evelyn, the diarist and secretary of the Royal Society (of which Stafford was a member), was among the spectators and was impressed by the solemn theatre of the proceedings and disgusted by their blatant injustice. Oates’s ‘testimony’, he thought, ‘should not have been taken against the life of a dog’. Evelyn also picked up some gossip which indicated that Stafford was disliked by members of his family, and had indulged ‘of a vice in Germany, which need not be named’.20 It was a perverse verdict in so far as the Lords had acquiesced to the prospect of a Catholic monarch, but, nevertheless, were ready to treat all Catholics as a threat to national security.
Among the supporters of the Exclusion Bill had been Robert Spencer, second Earl of Sunderland, hitherto the King’s man. Charles called his defection ‘the Kiss of Judas’, but the Countess of Sunderland declared that her husband had ‘gained immortal fame’. The King’s disfavour consigned Sunderland to the political wilderness, from where he soon returned. Halifax later remarked that the King ‘lived with his ministers as he did his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them’. Charles was easily bored by lengthy ‘serious discourse’ which led some ‘of the graver sort’ to lace their accounts of matters of state with ‘the coarsest kind of youthful talk’.21
Charles preferred young, witty and aristocratic hedonists who made him laugh and supplied him with concubines whose offspring considerably enlarged the aristocracy. The King did well by his bastards, and their mothers. Lady Castlemaine’s son, Charles Fitzroy, was made Earl of Southampton and later first Duke of Cleveland, and his brother Henry Fitzroy, first Duke of Grafton; Nell Gwynn’s son Charles became first Duke of St Albans and Louise de Kerouaille’s Charles, first Duke of Richmond. All these boys were provided with revenues appropriate to their status Richmond and his descendants got a portion of the impost levied on Newcastle coal shipped to London (which proved very lucrative) and good marriages were arranged for Charles’s illegitimate daughters.
A sensualist monarch and his pack of dissipated favourites delighted in shocking the world. In 1663 the playwright Sir Charles Sedley appeared on the balcony of a house in Covent Garden ‘acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined’ and delivered a ‘mountebank sermon’ in praise of an aphrodisiac that would ‘make all the cunts in London run after him’. He ended this piece of street theatre by ordering a glass of wine, ‘washed his prick in it’, drank it and then called for another with which he drank the King’s health. Samuel Pepys heard this tale and a report that ‘buggery is now almost grown so common among our gallants as in Italy and that the very pages begin to complain of it’. Some years later he noted that Charles had been greatly amused when Sedley and Charles Sackville, the sixth Earl of Dorset, ran through the streets of London ‘with their arses bare’ and assaulted the city watch. Dorset was present with the King in Thetford when he asked the local ‘fiddlers’ to play all the ‘bawdy songs’ in their repertoire.22
More sedate aristocrats like Halifax and Sunderland guided the King in the humdrum affairs of state. Sunderland was universally regarded as a political pendulum whose controlling mechanism was ambition and a sometimes desperate need to stay solvent. His royalist credentials were excellent (his father had been fatally wounded at Newbury), he had friends at court who obtained him the post of Gentleman of the Bedchamber and he scraped together £6,000 to buy the office of Secretary of State for the Northern Department in 1679. His principal duties were foreign affairs, as were those of his equally influential partner, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, which also handled colonial matters.
The secretaryship was Sunderland’s entrée into the King’s council and the springboard for a career in which, in the space of fifteen years, he successively served and abandoned Charles II and James II and somehow managed to ingratiate himself into the favour of William III. Extravagant, addicted to gambling, dismissive of those with whom he disagreed, Sunderland’s aloofness was accentuated by his languid drawl (‘whaat maaters who saarves his Majesty’) known as the ‘court tone’. By contrast, another of Charles’s ministers, John Hamilton, Duke of Lauderdale, had a tongue too large for his mouth, ‘which made him bedew all that he talked to’.23 Sunderland was an effective, if not always assiduous administrator, who sometimes signed state letters unread while at the card table. He shunned close attachment to any faction and relied upon his knack of providing his masters with what they wanted: the implementation of policy. In the process of making himself useful Sunderland paid off his debts.
Another indispensable creature, Sir George Jeffreys who was ennobled as a reward for services to the Crown, was one of Sunderland’s protégés. He was a pushy and ambitious lawyer in his mid-thirties who was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1683. Jeffreys came from Shropshire gentry stock, had a sharp legal brain and a waspish wit which he frequently exercised to frighten jurymen, witnesses and defendants. Like Sunderland, he was a chameleon whose views were tempered to the times and, consequently, he quickly moved onwards and upwards. In so far as he had any creed, it was that judiciary was the highly partial enforcing arm of a benevolent royal autocracy. Presiding over the trial of the Whig Lord William Russell for treason in 1683, Jeffreys pointedly reminded the court of the connections between the Whigs and those responsible for the martyrdom of Charles I, adding an oblique warning that they might again provoke a civil war.24 Sir Francis Bacon had once likened judges to ‘lions under the throne’, and in Jeffreys, Charles II and James II had one who was prepared to snarl and bite at his master’s bidding. He did and in 1685 became Lord Jeffreys of Wem.
Sunderland and Jeffreys were making their way upwards in a political world that was being rapidly transformed to the advantage of the aristocracy, old and new. Old government departments were expanded and new were created to regulate Britain’s growing overseas trade and colonies. The Navy Office (where Samuel Pepys worked), the Board of Trade, the Post Office and the Plantation Office were agencies of a centralised state in which more and more power was being concentrated in London. Enlarged bureaucracies extended the patronage of the Crown and its predominantly aristocratic ministers. They controlled appointments at every level, decided the awards of government contracts and approved army commissions.
New sources of patronage had an immense impact on political life by creating a network of reciprocity which extended across the country. An influential peer in London could procure an army commission for a younger son of a country squire in return for the father’s vote in the county ele
ction, or secure an excise post for a proven supporter in a coastal borough. The pattern extended to the legislature, with ministers offering favours to peers and MPs in return for their votes. Such deals were not new: what had changed was the amount of patronage available and its concentration in the hands of aristocratic ministers.
Looking back on Charles II’s reign and justifying his part in its politics, Halifax characterised it as a period of ‘general discontent’ which was to outright rebellion what a ‘spotted fever’ was to ‘plague’. He had slipped in and out of royal confidence and the twists and turns of his ministerial career earned him the nickname of ‘Trimmer’, although it could easily have been applied to Sunderland and others. Halifax was guided by the principle of salus populi, the safety of the people, which overrode party politics, which he deplored as ‘engines of dissension’. Public affairs contaminated a patrician of sensitivity and intellect: ‘The government of the world is a great thing, but it is a very coarse one, too, compared with the fineness of speculative knowledge.’
Halifax disdained faction for its own sake and saw himself as a patriot. He loved liberty, believed that the King was not above the law and that Parliament was vital for good government. Halifax’s ideals were firmly within the aristocratic ministerial tradition of pragmatism, dispassion and a devotion to the national welfare.25 For this, he was admired and listened to during the upheavals of James II’s reign.
12
The People Assembled
and Freely Chose
Them: The Glorious
Revolution and After
During the winter of 1688–9 the English and Scottish aristocracy reasserted its right to make and unmake kings. A large majority deserted James II, welcomed his son-in-law William of Orange, and participated in the Parliamentary proceedings which made William and his wife Mary joint monarchs. Peers and people were broadly of one mind. When the Duke of Norfolk entered King’s Lynn at the head of the Norfolk militia, ‘the tradesmen, seamen and inferior sort, put orange ribbons in their hats, shouting and echoing huzzas for the Prince of Orange and the Duke of Norfolk’.1 In Edinburgh, Colin Lindsay, third Earl of Balcarres, was horrified by the encouragement given to anti-Catholic mobs by his fellow peers.2 The Edinburgh riots were part of a vast carnival of disorder across the country in which bonfires were lit, windows were broken, Catholic chapels were looted and sometimes burned, and supporters of James maltreated. Lord Jeffreys, now Lord Chancellor, was nearly lynched by the London mob.
This wave of hooliganism and vandalism was an expression of anger against a dying regime that had upset the constitutional equilibrium and ridden roughshod over ancient liberties. There was also relief that the country was about to be rescued from a King whose ultimate goal appeared to be an absolutist, Catholic state of the sort ruled by his ally and secret paymaster, Louis XIV.
James II had inherited a favourable situation. The aristocracy and the rest of the country were reconciled to a Catholic monarch in his mid-fifties whose heir was his Protestant daughter, Mary. It was assumed by many experienced politicians such as Halifax that James would have the sense to play by the rules, accept the political and religious status quo and never allow his Catholicism to impinge on decisions of policy. Inactivity and dispassion ran against the grain of James’s character and he refused to let convention stand in his way. He was a deeply pious Catholic, wilful, stolid and oblivious to the feelings (and prejudices) of his subjects. His overriding aim was to integrate his fellow Catholics into national life by repealing the laws which had excluded them from public offices. Royal toleration extended to dissenters, but they suspected a decoy and their response was lukewarm and wary. As Halifax warned them in his Letter to a Dissenter of 1687, ‘You are therefore to be hugged now only that you may be squeezed later.’
Both the English and Scottish Parliaments blocked James’s plans. Eighty-five English peers voted against the repeal of the penal statutes against Catholics, fifty-seven (including twenty Catholics) voted in favour and nineteen wavered. It was a warning shot to which the King responded by imposing toleration by decree through Declarations of Indulgence in 1687 and 1688 which granted complete religious freedom. Whether his will alone could nullify statutes in this manner was a moot point, but what mattered was that James had signalled that he would govern without the aristocracy. Many of his subjects rightly detected a lurch towards absolutism.
The King’s rejection of the will of Parliament agitated an aristocracy already disconcerted by the rapid advancement of Catholics in public life. Five Catholic peers sat in James’s council, Catholics were being granted commissions in an enlarged army and were being appointed as judges, sheriffs and magistrates. In 1687, the Lord Lieutenants of twenty-one counties were sacked for suspected disloyalty and replaced by yes-men, including Jeffreys and thirteen inexperienced Catholic peers. Catholic gentry supplanted unsympathetic deputy lieutenants.3 The Anglican nobility was being hustled out of power in central and local government, and tampering with the Lord Lieutenancies had sinister implications, for it placed county militias under Catholic command.
James’s policies were hopelessly impractical. There were never enough Catholics (who made up a fifth of the hundred or so peers) available to fill the vacant posts at both national and local levels. Nonetheless, devout Anglican peers faced a crisis of conscience. In May 1688 the second Earl of Clarendon (son of Charles I’s Lord Chancellor) explained his moral dilemma to Princess Mary: ‘I had the happiness to be born a Protestant . . . I could much more willingly go to the stake in defence of it than live the greatest man in the world.’ Now he was faced with a choice between his faith and his allegiance to a monarch who was delivering control of the nation into the hands of Catholics. ‘I cannot in conscience give those men leave . . . to come into employments of the state, who, by their mistaken consciences, are bound to destroy the religion I profess.’4 Clarendon gave vent to his feelings by refusing to sit in a council which now included the royal confessor Edward Petre, a Jesuit.
Anglican peers were also disconcerted by James’s efforts to subordinate the Church of England. This culminated in an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute seven bishops for seditious libel in the summer of 1688. Twenty-one peers (including Clarendon) volunteered to stand bail for the clerics and the trial became a public test of the King’s popularity. When his Secretary of State Sunderland entered Westminster Hall at the beginning of the trial, he was kicked in the backside and threatened with a clenched fist.5 On his departure, someone shouted ‘Kill the new Popish dog.’ True to form, the protean Sunderland had converted to Rome the day before (and would revert to Anglicanism after James’s downfall). The bishops were acquitted and even James’s soldiers joined in the street celebrations in London and across the country.
Cheers for the bishops drowned those for the birth of the King’s son James in June. Assuming that the infant Prince of Wales grew to manhood, England and Scotland were henceforward to be ruled by a Catholic dynasty. The King was already acquiring the muscle to secure a Catholic monarchy by enlisting his co-religionists in Ireland. He had begun to dismantle the Protestant ascendancy and was raising a Catholic army under Catholic officers. Its future employment was predicted in the ballad ‘Lilliburlero’, written in a mock brogue by the Whig peer Thomas, Lord Wharton. In one verse, the Irish hailed their new Deputy Lieutenant, the Catholic Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel:
Ho, by my shoul, it is a Talbot
And he will cut de Englishman’s troat . . .
Now, now de heretics all go down,
By Chreist and St Patrick, the nation’s our own!
Published in October 1688 and set to a jaunty traditional air, ‘Lilliburlero’ caught the public mood and became the Glorious Revolution’s equivalent of the ‘Marseillaise’.
*
The birth of James’s son was the catalyst for a revolution. Its instigators were the Tory Earl of Danby, the Whig Earl of Devonshire, the Bishop of London, the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Lumley, Edward Russ
ell and Henry Sydney. Peers and cleric spoke for the people and the last three for the army and navy. Together these men claimed to be the authentic voice of a nation seeking rescue from tyranny and turmoil, and, it was they who invited William of Orange to invade England at the head of a Dutch army and promised him massive support. ‘Much the greatest part of the nobility and gentry’ would rally to the Prince when he landed. William agreed to the enterprise and secret approaches were made to disaffected Scottish peers.
At least in its early stages, William’s amphibious assault was a gamble. On paper, James’s English army outnumbered the invasion force and, once alerted to the threat, the King summoned reinforcements from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. He was whistling in the dark, for, as events soon revealed, his regime was a fragile structure supported by a tiny minority of his English and Scottish subjects. It buckled and disintegrated within six weeks of William’s landing at Torbay on the anniversary of an earlier deliverance from Catholicism, November. Protestants again detected the hand of a benign Providence.
James’s generals, including Lord John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, deserted to William and their regiments followed. The aristocracy frustrated attempts to muster the militia by James’s Lords Lieutenants. Mounted militiamen from Yorkshire, some in armour, laughed down the Lord Lieutenant the Duke of Newcastle, which may not have unduly troubled him, for he had already been won over for William by Danby.6 In Scotland, Lord Balcarres had been asked by James to command the Catholic and Episcopalian Highland nobility to mobilise its clansmen and march them to the Borders to intimidate northern England.7 Fearful that this provocative measure would lead to war, James’s Scottish councillors later insisted that they would deploy the Highlanders in the Lowlands only in a dire emergency. Nonetheless, some were stationed at Stirling, alongside clansmen raised by the pro-William Marquess of Atholl and John Campbell, the first Earl of Breadalbane.8
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 15
