However, it was not simply the case that Charles II was able to rule without Parliament for the rest of his reign as public opinion came increasingly to view the greatest threat to public order to come from the Whigs, not from any Popish Plot. The ferocity of the debates in the Parliaments of 1679, 1680 and 1681 obscures the extent to which Charles’s authority remained relatively secure. He exercised his right to dissolve and prorogue Parliaments with little direct opposition. His personal presence in the Lords in November 1680 probably played a major part in the defeat of the second Exclusion bill. He purged with ease leading Whigs like the Earls of Suffolk, Manchester and Essex from the lieutenancy and commissions of the peace. The judiciary was fully behind the Crown and most importantly, Charles’s financial strength enabled him to live off his own means after 1681. The severe challenges to royal authority laid down by the Whigs can give the impression that England teetered on the brink of another civil war in the 1680s. The truth was, however, that Charles II was in a far more powerful position than his father, thanks in part to French ‘gifts’, and once he had decided finally to decisively employ his prerogative powers to dissolve Parliament and reshape civic corporations in a more loyal mode, there was no stopping him by legal means. Attempts to reverse the ‘Tory reaction’ by force only revealed the weakness of domestic rebellion as a threat to the State by the 1680s and simply made the smears that the Whigs were old fanatical parliamentarians in sheep’s clothing stick. A popish successor would inherit the throne and the English Parliament would be in no shape to impose limitations upon his authority. It was James’s opponents, not the King himself, who wished to postpone the recall of Parliament in November 1688.
By 1685 the Whigs were in disarray. Shaftesbury had died in exile. William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney had been executed for their alleged part in the Rye House Plot, a desperate attempt to assassinate Charles II. A third conspirator, the Earl of Essex committed suicide in the Tower. The Duke of Monmouth was also forced to flee the country, tainted by involvement in attempts to murder his father. The Duke of York’s return from exile in 1682 was met with rapturous celebration. Political opponents had been purged from the boroughs through extensive use of quo warranto writs compelling them to substantiate the legality of their charters, which were frequently found forfeit in court. New charters were consequently drawn up, giving the King approval for the appointment of civic officers. Tax revenue had soared to £1.3 million. Finally the King had abandoned his pursuit of a policy of accommodation with Protestant dissenters and put his support behind a campaign for a rigid Anglican uniformity in worship. Magistrates persecuted Protestant nonconformists and Catholics, driven on by the Privy Council.
The Stuart dynasty looked as secure as it had ever done upon the British throne. Yet this security had been bought at the price of leaving the King in thrall to his ‘natural’ supporters, the alliance of Tories and Anglicans. The games of Charles II’s early years, of playing off one faction against another, had been abandoned. The danger was, as has been stated earlier, that these Anglican Tories were not mere Stuart sycophants or advocates of unrestrained royal power. They believed in a hereditary monarchy that was legally bound to defend the Church of England. James II would discover what would happen when he tested the political allegiances of Tories against their religious convictions.
2
THE PROTESTANT DUKE AND THE POPISH PRINCE
Now were the hearts of the people of God gladdened, and their hopes and expectations raised that this man might be a deliverer for the nation, and the interest of Christ in it, who had been even harassed out with trouble and persecution, and even broken with the weight of oppression under which they had long groaned. Now also they hoped that the day was come in which the good old cause of God and religion that had lain as dead and buried for a long time would revive again; and now was the sounding of trumpets and alarm for wars heard.
EXCERPT FROM THE RECORDS OF THE AXMINSTER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH ON THE LANDING OF THE DUKE OF MONMOUTH1
Jeffreys made all the West an Aceldama [field of blood]: some places quite depopulated and nothing seen in ’em but foresaken walls, unlucky gibbets and ghostly carcasses. The trees were loaden almost as thick with quarters as leaves; the houses and the steeples covered as close with heads as at other times with crows or ravens. Nothing could be [more] like Hell than all those parts; nothing so like the devil as he. Caldrons hissing, carcasses boiling, pitch and tar sparking and glowing, blood and limbs boiling and tearing and mangling, and he the great director of it all.
J. TUTCHIN
THE WESTERN MARTYROLOGY OR BLOODY ASSIZES (1689)2
In the summer of 1684 Thomas Dangerfield, professional perjurer and discoverer of the ‘Meal Tub Plot’, toured Cornwall impersonating James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son. Like the real Monmouth, Dangerfield aped royal progresses by touring the countryside, touching for ‘the King’s evil’ (scrofula – the form of tuberculosis which the monarchs were held to be able cure by the laying-on of hands). In dispensing his less than royal touch, Dangerfield fleeced his followers by tying counterfeit half-guineas about the necks of his dupes, while they, in return, gave him two genuine guineas. The Duke of York’s attempt to indict Dangerfield for scandalum magnatum forced him to lie low but in March 1685 he was captured by Crown officers and imprisoned in Newgate. The following May he was tried and convicted of perjury for writing his narrative of the Popish Plot. Dangerfield was sentenced to stand in the pillory for two days and to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from there to Tyburn. Although he survived this brutal punishment, on his return journey from Tyburn he was accosted by a Tory barrister, Robert Frances. Frances asked Dangerfield ‘“how he liked his race, and how did after his heats [meaning his whipping];” to whome Daingerfeild replyed, “You are the sonn of a whore.”’3 Dangerfield’s foul-mouthed reply to Frances’s insults earnt him a blow from the lawyer’s small bamboo cane which pierced his eye, fatally wounding him. He died between two hours and two days later, according to different accounts.4
The fate of the real Duke of Monmouth was even worse than that of the pretender’s pretender. Already convicted by bill of attainder through Parliament as a traitor for raising a rebellion against the new king, his uncle James II, Monmouth was executed on 15 July 1685 without standing trial. James had thought to save his nephew from the slow strangulation of a short-drop hanging by ordering that he be beheaded instead. However, the words of the Norfolk victualler convicted of seditious talk in 1684 for stating that ‘The Duke [of Monmouth]’s neck is so thick that they could not cut off his head’ proved to be horribly prescient. It took some five blows from the executioner’s axe to sever Monmouth’s head from his body.5 Indeed, the axeman threw down his weapon after the third blow and was only convinced to finish the job after threats from Bishops of Ely and Bath and Wells, who were in attendance.
Just over a month earlier, on 11 June, Monmouth had landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset to begin his ill-fated insurrection.6 The rebels who had sailed from the Netherlands to the West Country were very poorly equipped: they came in two small ships, had only four small cannons, insufficient guns, no horses or wagons and very little food or cash. In these circumstances it was remarkable that a rebellion should be undertaken at all, and the decision to do so was made as a result of three main issues. First, the Earl of Argyll, a leading opponent of the King’s policies in Scotland who had escaped from that kingdom with a sentence of death hanging over his head, had already secured money, men and supplies for a rising against James’s regime in the north, and clearly the Duke had to act now if he wished to benefit from making a two-pronged attack. Second, Monmouth’s own immediate options were severely limited. His breach with his uncle, the new king, was now irreparable. Once close, they had been pushed apart as Monmouth emerged as the figurehead for the exclusionists and as the Duke’s patron, Shaftesbury, pushed him towards adopting more openly ‘royal’ behaviour. In letters James was now exerti
ng greater pressure on his son-in-law, William of Orange, to monitor the behaviour of Monmouth and other Whig exiles. The other possibility for Monmouth, of working as a military commander for hire – he had once been captain-general of the King’s forces in Scotland and had defeated the Covenanter rebels at the battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679 – had not prompted any job offers from European princes. In fact, orders for his arrest had already been issued, at the instigation of King James, by Carlos II of Spain. Aside from taking part in the rising against his uncle, Monmouth’s alternatives appeared to consist of attempting an unlikely rapprochement with James or waiting either, at best, for his expulsion from the Netherlands or, at worst, for the assassin’s blade. Finally, Monmouth’s own overinflated sense of honour and personal dignity, probably aggravated by constant Tory jibes concerning his mother Lucy Walter’s low birth and loose morals, would be impugned if he allowed Argyll to begin a rebellion, while he, the son of the dead king, sat on his hands.
Monmouth’s childhood had been traumatic as his mother moved him from the home of one of her lovers to another (her relationship with Charles was over by the early 1650s). Having already escaped one kidnap attempt in 1650 (possibly orchestrated by agents of the Commonwealth), Monmouth was seized from his mother in 1658 by Thomas Ross, one of Charles II’s spies. Although by 1662 Monmouth had joined his father’s court in England, he lacked the education of a gentleman and struggled with reading and writing. His oversensitivity to perceived assaults on his name (or that of his family) had a violent side, as when he ordered soldiers to mutilate an MP, Sir John Coventry, who he felt had insulted the King. His personal integrity was already heavily compromised by the activities of individuals like the inveterate plotter Robert Ferguson (later to turn Jacobite in the 1690s), who had promised to London republicans that Monmouth was ready to lead a rising in England. Could the Duke hope to emerge as anything other than a coward if he went back on these promises made by his supporters? Moreover, Ferguson had also issued false promises to his fellow rebels concerning the level of support Monmouth could expect in the capital if he made a landing in England.
For Monmouth, the expedition represented the last of throw of the dice in his political and military career, but the success of this all-or-nothing gamble was not dependent on his actions alone – for three reasons. First, it was vital that Argyll’s operation in Scotland and planned risings prompted by Whig earls in northern England should prove enough of a distraction that James would be forced to split his army to fight on two fronts. Secondly, the seizure of control of the capital from the court by anti-Catholic mobs, as had almost occurred during the Exclusion Crisis, was necessary if James was to be deprived of the human and financial resources of London. Finally, Monmouth was also relying on the appeal of his cause being sufficient to gather enough men and supplies in the West Country to mount a serious challenge to his uncle’s authority. In the first two instances the Duke would be bitterly disappointed, but in the third he met with surprising success. Argyll’s expedition, despite being better equipped and organised than Monmouth’s, and despite taking place in a nation with a recent history of resistance to the Stuart monarchy, proved a dismal failure. His troops, garrisoned at Eilean Dearg, fled at the sight of English naval ships and even his standard, proclaiming opposition to ‘Popery, Tyranny and Arbitrary Government’, fell into enemy hands. On 14 June the Earl himself, who had fled in disguise, armed with three pistols, was captured by a lowly weaver, John Riddell. Argyll was executed on 30 June 1685. When his head was cleaved from his shoulders, it was reported, his body jerked violently upwards and was thrown back on its feet as blood spouted from his severed neck, needing the executioners to pin it back on the ground.7 Despite forecasts by a local astrologer, Hollwell, that a great battle between the Duke and the King would take place in Yorkshire, in which the Crown party would be routed, the hoped-for rising in the north did not take place either.8 The capital likewise remained loyal to the Crown and the mood of the crowd pro-Church and King.9
However, in the West Country and especially in Somerset, Monmouth managed to gather about him thousands of supporters willing to give their arms, money and lives for his cause. Between three and four thousand men joined his rebellion. The Duke had specifically chosen his landing site of Lyme Regis in the correct belief that it was an area where his cause would be warmly received. Some historians have portrayed Monmouth’s support as coming mainly from Puritan agricultural labourers with sympathy for the parliamentarian ‘good old cause’, terrified by the prospect of living under a popish monarch. Certainly Somerset had a strong tradition of religious nonconformity, with a recorded eleven thousand dissenters attending ‘conventicles’ (nonconformist religious meetings) in 1669. During the civil wars areas of Somerset had demonstrated spontaneous support for the parliamentarian cause, and into the Restoration period the relief of the royalist siege of Taunton by Roundhead troops was still being celebrated with bonfires and feasting. During the 1660s and 1670s convictions for speaking seditious words revealed an undercurrent of sympathy for republican and/or parliamentarian ideals. John Diches, a labourer from Hatch Beauchamp, attacked a drinker in a tavern for having been a royalist soldier and for speaking against dissenters. Several leading figures in promoting the Popish Plot also resided in or near the county, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Thynne of Longleat, Edmund Prideaux, exclusionist MP for Taunton, and George Speke of Ilminster. Popular support for Monmouth was evident in Somerset even after the discovery of the Rye House Plot, with one Taunton serge weaver accused of spreading the rumour that the Duke had been found guilty of involvement in it simply ‘because he was a Protestant Prince’. Support for the Duke was particularly strong in the county’s cloth-working areas, among formerly prosperous artisans whose trade had suffered as a result of war and foreign competition.10
Yet Monmouth’s appeal was not restricted to nonconformists or old republicans. If it had been, we could not expect him to have accumulated as many followers as he did. Rather, though the Duke initially avoided making any explicit claims upon the Crown (preferring, as William of Orange would later, to assert that all he wished to do was to secure a free Parliament),11 it was the appeal of Monmouth as a royal pretender, as the ‘true king’, that attracted most popular support to him. These popular aspirations for Monmouth as a ‘royal’ deliverer fed upon rumours that had begun to circulate in the immediate aftermath of Charles II’s death. It had been alleged, as with Charles I and his father James I, that James had murdered his brother. Anonymous papers found in March 1685 repeated the frenzied accusations made of James during the Popish Plot: that he had started the Fire of London, murdered Justice Godfrey and poisoned his brother to get his crown. One Mary Kemp of Waltham was said to have claimed that Charles II appeared to his brother as a ghostly apparition and accused James of murdering him. (The local authorities examined Kemp, only sixteen and very sickly, and took her into custody. They reported that if she was not given bail it was likely that she would die in gaol.)12 Indictments for uttering seditious words reached a peak in 1684–5, with seventy-three of the eighty charges brought for public declarations of support for Monmouth or contempt for James. Interestingly, the greatest number of indictments occurred outside the counties directly involved in the rebellion. James’s legitimacy was frequently questioned, despite the fact that it was legally sound. He was described as a ‘rogue and a bastard’. Often his Catholicism alone was deemed enough to disinherit him. Thomas James, a clergyman of Sedgley in Staffordshire, was reported to have said, ‘itt is not fitt a Popish king should reigne over us’.13 Edward Swannell of Buckingham-shire was indicted in Easter 1685 for stating that the ‘King of England was not King until he was crowned’.14 In contrast, it was popularly affirmed that Charles had married Monmouth’s mother and had a copy of their marriage certificate which he kept hidden in a secret ‘black box’. Monmouth’s popularity extended beyond the British Isles, as in the West Indian and American colonies colonists drank his health and ac
claimed him as the rightful king. Bermuda had its own revolt against royal authority, the rebels claiming that the ‘Duke was rightful king and no Papist’.15
Monmouth’s image as a king-in-waiting had been carefully cultivated by his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, in the 1680s, as the popularity of the mock progresses, when the Duke had toured the West Country and the north-west greeting supporters, had demonstrated. Monmouth’s own personality better fitted him for the role of a popular pretender than that of a godly national deliverer. He had never quite left behind the rakish behaviour of his youth, when he had courted almost as many mistresses as his own father (and produced almost as many bastards), spent vast amounts on wigs, balls and clothes and had had to be pardoned in 1671 for murdering a beadle who had attempted to break up a drunken brawl in a brothel in which the Duke was involved. Even when he finally met his fate on the scaffold, Monmouth refused to acknowledge the unlawfulness or immorality of his most long-lasting love affair with the married Henrietta Wentworth.16 His personal behaviour (and indeed his rather lukewarm attachment to Protestantism) made him a poor candidate as a godly prince. However, what Monmouth’s progresses had demonstrated was his easy conviviality when in conversation with ordinary people and his ability to show courtesy and kindness to marginalised groups and individuals. An example of this is his treatment of dissenters. As a group the Society of Friends refused to give hat honour – taking off one’s hat in front of someone of higher social standing – viewing it as a prideful human affectation. While on his way to the south-west in 1683, it was reported that Monmouth had doffed his hat to a Quaker in Chichester (while allowing the man to keep his hat on his head).17
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