Moreover, this book also challenges the revisionists’ claim that the constitutional changes wrought by the Revolution were insignificant. Whig historiography portrayed the Glorious Revolution as a battle between the forces of liberty (represented by William III) and the forces of tyranny (headed by James II). Whig historians were right to see the Revolution as a fight for liberty, but what that liberty meant was highly contested. There was the liberty that James II wanted for his Catholic and nonconformists subjects, far more extensive than that granted by the Toleration Act, but which he attempted to secure through sometimes illegal means. There were the liberties secured by the ‘ancient constitution’ (entrenched, it was felt, by Protestant hegemony in church and state) that many of James’s Protestant subjects wanted to see preserved from the perceived threat of Catholic absolutism. There was the liberty that the Catholic Irish sought from English interference, denied by William’s army at the cost of thousands of lives. There was the liberty that English merchants sought post-revolution to trade without the restrictions of royal monopolies, a freedom which, once secured, led to a massive increase in the slave trade. In the seventeenth century, many thought of ‘liberty’ as ‘the privileges, immunities or rights enjoyed by prescription or grant’ (OED), for example, the rights of members of Parliament to freedom of debate. Both before and after the Revolution, very few people conceived of liberty in the terms of the philosopher John Locke, as ‘the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action’, that modern, liberal understanding of liberty as entailing a broad freedom from state or church interference in matters of private belief. Yet, through the establishment of legal toleration for most Protestants and the lapsing of controls on the press, both changes wrought as much by expediency and contingency as by principle, the state had taken an important step back from making windows into men’s souls, and an important step towards permitting the free discussion of public affairs. An important move, however unintended, towards the freedoms enjoyed by modern liberal democracies had been made.
Again, chronology is important. There is much to support the idea that the immediate settlement of 1688–9 was a fudge designed to satisfy all parties and the Declaration of Rights did not place significant conditions upon the crown. However, by extending the discussion of political changes to incorporate the whole of William III’s reign, it is possible to look at the longer-term impact of the change of dynasty upon the British constitution. If the Bill of Rights does not represent a prototype of a written constitution, William’s need for parliamentary taxes to pay for war with France between 1690 and 1697 led to greater and greater concessions to the legislature: regular sessions, scrutiny of executive spending, even approval of royal appointments. By 1695 Parliament’s transformation from an early-seventeenth-century ‘event’, infrequently called at the whim of the monarch, into a permanent institution had also led to changes in the conduct of politics. Frequent Parliaments meant frequent and contested elections, participated in by an electorate that was at the largest it would be until the Great Reform Act in 1832. Party politicking out of doors was mirrored by partisan voting in the House, with only a minority of MPs voting across party lines. Government office, too, increasingly became a way to reward electoral success. A more recognisably modern era of party politics had begun.
Finally, this book demonstrates that though this cannot be called a revolution by the people, in that the most significant figures in driving events forward were a European princeling, a British king and a small gaggle of politicians and clerics, it can be described as a popular revolution. Whig historians of the Glorious Revolution used to cite the lapsing of the Licensing Act of 1695 as the point at which Britain gained a free political press. However, before this date it was already clear that a sophisticated news network of printed news-sheets, manuscript newsletters and word of mouth was keying ordinary people into current events. Both William of Orange and James II recognised the importance of courting public opinion in winning their struggle over the British crown. Arguably, it was James’s failure in this battle for popular support that cost him control of his capital, as it descended into anti-Catholic rioting, unrest that also contributed to the King’s decision to flee the country. Through evidence gathered from depositions for uttering seditious words, loyal addresses and subscription to oaths of loyalty, this book also uncovers how ordinary people reacted to these events and demonstrates that they were anything but uninterested in the outcome of this British Revolution.
1
A POPISH PLOT?
On 17 October 1678 two men, a baker and a farmer, were passing some waste ground on the south side of Primrose Hill, then just north of London, when they noticed a pair of gloves and a stick lying in a hedge. On reaching the nearby White Horse tavern they alerted the landlord, who accompanied them to the spot. There, behind the bushes, lay the body of Sir Edmund Godfrey, a Middlesex magistrate who had gone missing five days earlier. Godfrey was fully clothed, his body lying face downward, a sword run through his chest, its point protruding some six inches from his back. His money had not been taken but there was no sign of his wallet.
The verdict of the coroner’s jury was wilful murder. The inquest had revealed that Godfrey had suffered two sword wounds, a superficial one to his chest and then the one on his left breast, which had passed right through his body. However, these seemed to have been inflicted post-mortem. Contusions round his neck indicated to the jury that he had been strangled to death. In reaching this conclusion the jury glossed over some confusing details about the state of Godfrey’s body. His shoes were clean, though the ground was muddy, indicating that his body had been carried to the scene. The sword he was impaled upon was his own and his neck appeared to have been broken.
In other circumstances Edmund Godfrey’s strange death might have been the occasion of mild curiosity, perhaps even a lurid murder pamphlet or two. However, a few weeks earlier, two men, Titus Oates and Israel Tonge, had requested that Godfrey take their depositions on oath as to the truth of their accusations of a ‘Popish Plot’ to kill the King. Oates and Tonge were remarkable characters, and it says something of the atmosphere of the times that the words of these two oddballs were ever given any credence. According to contemporary descriptions, Oates’s physical appearance alone would have a left a permanent impression on whoever met him. He had, it was said, ‘the speech of the gutter, and a strident and sing-song voice, so that he seemed to wail rather than to speak. His brow was low, his eyes small and sunk deep in his head; his face was flat compressed in the middle so as to look like a dish or discus; on each side were prominent ruddy cheeks, his nose was snub, his mouth in the very centre of his face, for his chin was almost equal in size to the rest of his face. His head scarcely protruded from his body and was bowed towards his chest.’1
Oates’s life up until this point had been as colourful as his appearance. His father, Samuel Oates, had been a Baptist chaplain in the New Model Army and, through the patronage of Sir Richard Barker, had acquired the clerical living of All Saints’, Hastings. He was probably related to the ‘Captain Oates’ who was executed at York in 1664 for his part in the ‘Presbyterian Plot’ of that year. Titus was educated at Merchant Taylors’ school and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, although his academic career was cut short at both institutions by expulsions. He transferred from Gonville to St John’s but was sent down without a degree in 1669 after a dispute with his tutor about a tailor’s bill. He was not, in any case, academically able, his tutor dismissing him as a ‘great dunce’. Despite his lack of academic qualifications and his separatist religious beliefs, he took holy orders in the Anglican Church and was presented to a curacy at Sandhurst in Surrey, with the help, it seems, of Lord Howard, a Roman Catholic. He acquired another living, Bobbing in Kent, in March 1673, but was ejected after complaints from parishioners about his drunkenness and heterodox religious opinions.
He returned home to Hastings, but was soon in hot water again, after accusing an enemy of
his father’s, William Parker, of sodomy. The case went up to the Privy Council, which exonerated Parker, who at once brought a case for £1000 in damages. Oates hastily left the country in May 1675 as a ship’s chaplain but was dismissed from this post, again under a cloud, in early 1676, when the frigate returned from Tangiers. His connections with the London Roman Catholic community, which may in part have been a result of sexual proclivities as heterodox as his religious beliefs, led to his being appointed chaplain to the Earl of Norwich’s household. He again succeeded in infuriating his employers and was out of a job within three months. On 3 March 1677 his career took a new turn, as he converted to Roman Catholicism.
Oates was admitted into the Church by a lunatic priest named Berry, who had converted between Protestantism and Catholicism innumerable times himself. Again, Oates’s social connections made up for his lack of intellect, tact or self-discipline. Richard Strange, the head of the Jesuit Order in England, arranged for him to attend the English College at Valladolid in Spain. Strange’s decision to fund Oates’s education was remarkable since Oates knew no Latin or Spanish, in which languages all instruction at the College was given. As soon as this was discovered Oates was forced to return to England, where he met ‘Captain’ William Bedloe and his brother James. The two were master con-men and James quickly relieved Oates of ten pieces of eight. Broke, Oates turned again to his patron Strange, who provided the money and letters of introduction necessary for him to be enrolled at the college of St Omer in northern France. Here he presented himself under the name Sampson Lucy on 10 December 1677 and remained until June 1678, when, having lost the support of Strange, who had been replaced as Jesuit provincial by Thomas Whitebread, he was yet again expelled.
It was at this point that Oates struck up his partnership with Israel Tonge. He had met Tonge on a number of occasions before, but it was only now, armed as Oates was with his knowledge of the Society of Jesus, that Tonge became really interested in him. Tonge was obsessed to the point of insanity with the idea that there was a Jesuit plot afoot to overturn Protestantism in England. Like Oates, he seems to have come from a family of plotters and plot hunters. His relative Thomas Tonge was executed in 1662 for his part in Venner’s Rising, an insurrection by members of the radical Fifth Monarchist sect, a group who believed that violent revolution was necessary to overturn earthly government and make way for the rule of Christ and his saints. Tonge had begun his professional career during the civil wars. He had been made a Fellow of University College, Oxford, during the Parliamentarian Visitation in 1649. Having secured the title of Doctor of Divinity, he was then appointed to a fellowship at the newly established Durham College. The closure of the college in 1659 and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 made pickings lean for this Puritan clergyman and for a while he settled in the small country living of Leintwardine in Herefordshire. However, in June 1666 he was appointed to the living of St Mary Stayning in the City of London but his enjoyment of this prestigious new post was short-lived. Less than three months later the church and most of the parish were reduced to ashes in the Great Fire. The experience seems to have driven Tonge to a mental breakdown.
He spent two years as chaplain to the army garrison at Tangier but through the influence of Sir Richard Barker, a City physician, he acquired the living of St Michael’s, Wood Street, on his return. With the addition of the rectory of Aston in Herefordshire in 1672, Tonge was out of financial difficulties and he settled down to live the life of a comfortably off widower in Barker’s household in the Barbican. Material comfort did not, though, bring mental ease. Tonge remained obsessed by the cataclysmic destruction of his London parish in the Great Fire. He became convinced that the Jesuits had been responsible for it, and not only this event but also the civil wars and the execution of Charles I. In 1671 he undertook a translation of French attacks on Jesuit casuistry under the title Jesuits’ Morals but sales of the pamphlet were disastrous, a reminder that the reading public did not have a limitless appetite for tales of Jesuit intrigue. Undaunted, he settled down to compose his History of the Jesuits, a work which did not find a publisher until 1679. Around 1675 he appears to have heard the first rumours of a Catholic assassination plot to kill Charles II, from a man called Richard Greene.
Tonge was in a desperate state when he and Oates crossed paths again in August 1678. He had just failed to convince Parliament of the dangers of a Popish Plot and was frantic that his story was not being believed. The elaborate story that Oates constructed from his recent encounters with the Jesuits gave Tonge exactly the validation he needed at this point. On 1 August Tonge sat spellbound as Oates wove his elaborate tale of a Popish Plot in which, he claimed, the conspirators had also planned to kill off their Protestant bloodhound, Tonge. He further whetted Tonge’s appetite by refusing to let him read the manuscript himself. On 10 August, after the penniless Oates apparently had tried to sell his story to the Jesuits themselves, he finally left Tonge a written account of his story set out in forty-three numbered paragraphs, ‘under the wainscot at the farther end of Sir Richard Barker’s gallery in his house at the Barbican, near to the Doctor’s chamber door’.2 Tonge was now convinced that he must take Oates’s story to the King. His friend Christopher Kirkby, a chemist who had had contact with Charles II, himself an amateur scientist, handed the King a letter detailing the plot. Charles asked to know more about it, and on the King’s return from his morning walk in St James’s Park, Kirkby regaled him with the full colourful story.
Pope Innocent IX, Kirkby claimed, had provided funds for two Jesuits, Thomas Pickering and John Grove, to shoot Charles II, four Irishmen to stab him and Sir George Wakeman, the Queen’s doctor, to poison him. The King then requested to speak with both Kirkby and Tonge later that evening. At this meeting Tonge told Charles that the Catholics planned to follow the assassination by raising the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland against his brother, after which they were to be subjugated piecemeal by the French. The King questioned some aspects of the story, namely the involvement of the French and of persons of quality like Wakeman. He was, though, sufficiently concerned about Tonge’s evidence to turn the matter over to his chief minister, the Earl of Danby, for further investigation.
The following day Tonge and Kirkby were interviewed by Danby and Tonge appears to have given the minister the same forty-three-article narrative originally supplied to him by Oates. Danby’s first move was to have the named assassins shadowed and the Jesuits’ correspondence intercepted at the Post Office. This prompted Oates or Tonge, in desperation at having their fabrication uncovered, to forge incriminating letters which were sent to Thomas Bedingfield, the Duke of York’s Jesuit confessor. However, the cover-up backfired and instead led to Charles’s brother James hearing of the plot (about which he had previously been kept in the dark) via Bedingfield. James now pressed his brother to reveal the matter to the Privy Council in order that they could get to the bottom of things. Oates himself, possibly in fear of his life at the hands of old Jesuit acquaintances, came out of hiding and on 6 September took the momentous decision (almost certainly prompted by Tonge, who wanted to cover his back by having his ‘source’ swear to the truthfulness of his story) to give evidence on the plot before a Justice of the Peace, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.
At this stage, however, there was no sign that the plot would prove anything less than simply one of the many still-born rumours of diabolic schemes to assassinate the King. Charles, previously open-minded about Tonge’s information, had had his suspicions raised by the forged letters sent to Bedingfield. Tonge was once again in a state of desperation, sensing that the frustration he had encountered in getting his story heard in 1677 would be repeated. However, James remained determined that the matter should come before the Privy Council and on 27 September Oates’s testimony was heard by the Committee of Foreign Affairs, a committee comprising the King, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Privy seal, the Lord Treasurer and two Secretaries of State. The plot was deemed serious enough to warrant a
special meeting of the full Privy Council the next day, to which Oates was summoned to give evidence in person. He delivered a bravura performance, reciting his now well-rehearsed story, deftly sidestepping questions about the forged letters by stating that Jesuits always wrote in a ‘disguised hand’.
The following day, the 29 September, another session was held, in which the King momentarily caught Oates off guard with questions on the topography of Paris and the physical appearance of Don John of Austria, whom Oates had claimed to have met. However, Oates also had a stroke of luck in his readiness to elaborate on the involvement of Edward Coleman, the Duke of York’s secretary, a man Oates had never actually encountered. Without the evidence that was found in Coleman’s papers, the material seized from the other Jesuit suspects looked remarkably thin. As the Lord Chancellor commented a few days after the Council had heard the evidence of the suspects named by Oates, ‘amongst the many bags of papers that have been seized there doth not appear one line relating to this matter’.3 Coleman’s letters, however, were a different case entirely. His correspondence with Louis XIV’s confessor, La Chaise, contained derogatory references to Charles and, more importantly, Coleman’s own ill-considered thoughts on altering the religion and government of England. On 16 October the King was informed of the content of the letters and Coleman was taken into custody at Newgate. The Council was concerned to appear to be prosecuting the plot rigorously as Parliament was due to meet in three days, and the King ordered Sir William Jones to draw up indictments against the Jesuits in prison by Christmas, but as yet there was no mood of panic. However, the discovery of Godfrey’s body, and the testimony of Oates at the bar of the House of Commons, would change the atmosphere completely.
The Glorious Revolution Page 3
