affirmitavely that he will reedily and willingly confirm [sic] to it [the Declaration of Indulgence], But wth all declares it is not for want of inclination if he complys not wth what the King desires. This answer being not intended for a fixed opinion or resolution, for if he be resolved of any thing it is, that he will be convinced of anything, where ye argument to ye contrary shall be more forcible.
Like the loyal addresses received from Anglican clergy and Tory magistrates, these were hollow promises. What James sought was not merely the public’s assent to granting ‘liberty of conscience’, if that meant merely tolerating private opinion, but also its consent to the full religious and political emancipation of Catholics and dissenters. Indeed, it has to be wondered why the crown bothered tendering this question, couched as it was in such generous terms. Perhaps it was intended, like the loyal addresses, to give at face value the impression of broad public approval for James’s policy of toleration.
The two key questions, whether respondents would repeal the tests if they stood in Parliament or would support the election of MPs that would, received overwhelmingly negative replies. Only just under a quarter of those canvassed replied positively to the proposal that the tests should be repealed.58 Even this number is probably an exaggeration of support, as the process of purging the bench and the corporations went on at the same time as officers were being tendered the three questions (the canvassing itself taking place from the autumn of 1687 to the summer of 1688). Consequently the ratio of nonconformists, Anglicans and Catholics in place was not constant.59 It was alleged by the Bishop of Carlisle that set answers had been developed to the King’s three questions: ‘it is believed most of our Gentlemen will agree upon one and the same answer though given in severally indistinct papers, as they have lately done in other counties.’60 Certainly many of the replies received are remarkably similar and this uniformity may also have been a result of answers not being recorded verbatim.61
The dismal response James received to the first two questions casts doubt on the likely success of his project of producing a Parliament pliable enough to consent to the removal of the tests. We can never have a definite answer as James abandoned the plan before it ever came to the polls. However, there are very good reasons for thinking that, had William not intervened when he did, James might have achieved his goals. First, it is a mistake to see the tendering of the three questions as a means by which the King could test public opinion. This was not the primary intent of the exercise: it was to identify, rather than quantify, those who would comply with repeal and those who would not. Those who objected were to be removed from their places and more pliable individuals put in their stead. The secret instructions given to the King’s agents make it clear that this was part of the machinery of a political purge, not a form of seventeenth-century opinion poll. They were ordered ‘to inspect the present state of each Corporation, with respect to the Magistrates in being, whether there be any in, that are not fitt and proper, or whether any are omitted to be put into the Government, which if placed therein, may be useful and serviceable for promoting and securing good Elections, as also any methods and expedients that have a tendency thereunto’.62 By the side of names of judges and civic officers, agents would place their comments as to the reliability or otherwise of these individuals. Beside the name of one Lincolnshire magistrate was the comment: ‘This is one of the worst of them, fitt to be turned out.’63 Particular notice was taken of how many Catholics and wealthy dissenters lived in each area.64
By the spring of 1688 over twelve hundred members of town corporations had been turned out. Those put in their places were, in the words of Sir John Bramston, ‘Papists, and where not Papists, Fanaticks’.65 The intruded were widely reviled: in Somerset the new sheriff, Edward Strode, was threatened with physical violence by former grand jury members, refused the gaol rolls by the former sheriff, Edward Hobbes, had one of his bailiffs indicted on a misdemeanour and was burnt in effigy in local towns.66 Dr Robert Grey, rector of Bishop Wearmouth and prebendary of Durham cathedral, was accosted by John Lamb, a newly appointed Catholic justice of the peace, ‘a busy, active and fierce man for that party’ while he was riding from his rectory to the city. Lamb ‘overtook the Doctor, sneered at him and told him he wondered he would ride upon so fine a palfrey when his Saviour was content to ride upon a colt, the foal of an ass; the doctor replied “tis true, Sir, but the king has made so many asses justices of the peace, he has not left me one to ride upon.”’ Sir John Reresby was disdainful of the social standing of the new appointees, observing that of two Justices put in the West Riding commission one could not read or write and the other was a bailiff for rents, while ‘neither of them have one foot of freehold land in England’.67
Yet, as a result of the nature of seventeenth-century elections, the obvious hostility towards the new incumbents in the magistracy and corporations was less important than the intruded individuals’ support for repeal. Most elections at this time were not contested and candidates were instead ‘selected’ through discussions amongst local bigwigs. For example, in the 1685 elections, out of 270 seats in Parliament, only in seventy-four were contests recorded. Hence it was far more important, and a far more realistic objective, to try to secure a loyal bench and common council than to try to win over the majority of the estimated two hundred thousand voters in England at this time.68 The crown’s relative lack of interest in the electorate itself can be seen in the new charter issued for the corporation of Hull, which left the franchise completely unchanged, knowing that what mattered was to secure the loyalty of the magistracy.69
Precedent might suggest that James’s scheme would fail, given the hostility of his first Parliament to the introduction of Catholic officers into the army, despite the extensive quo warranto campaign undertaken by Charles II to remodel the bench and corporations between 1681 and 1685. However, the goals of the two kings in revising town charters were quite different, for whereas Charles wished to break the power of urban Whiggery and dissent, arguably to help prevent his having to call another Parliament, James wished to promote just these elements, precisely so that he could assemble a Parliament which would consent to taking off the laws. In fact, in some ways, rather than representing the intrusion of new elements into local government, James’s purges represented something like the restoration of the ‘natural’ order in urban government: kicking out the Tory squirearchy imposed by Charles and reintroducing merchants and tradesmen who represented the genuine elite in towns and cities.70
Finally, James’s opponents appear to have been less than certain that he would fail in his design. Sir Patrick Hume, a former associate of the Earl of Argyll, wrote to William of Orange that, if the dissenters could be brought to favour repeal, ‘no doubt the King and they will carry the Corporations or Towns and some Counties. I am confident that hopes of the contrary are ill founded and will prove vain.’71 Another correspondent wrote to the Prince that, despite James’s unpopularity, ‘yet the King is still assured that by his power in the Corporations he shall have a House of Commons to his liking, and doubts not of getting such a Party in the House of Lords as will do what he seems to desire.’72 The King’s agents also expressed confidence in securing MPs who would consent to the repeal of the tests: ‘The Roman Catholiques, Independants, Anabaptists, and Quaquers, that are numerous in many places, are generally in your Ma[jes]ties interest, notwithstanding the many rumours, and suggestions to divide and create jealousies among them. These are unanimously agred to elect such members of Parliament, as will abolish these Tests and Lawes.’73 Indeed, one of James’s officers, John Eston, complained that it was to ‘the misery of this Kingdom, that so much Democrasie is mixed in the Government, that thereby the exercise of ye Souvraign power should be in any manner limited by ye suffrages of the common people, whose humours are allwayes fluctuating, and ye most part of them guided, not by reason, but deliberation like mere animals’. Thankfully, Eston said, the King now had an opportunity to alter the democratic
element of the constitution to better serve his needs, ‘for otherwise wee may be destroyed by that which was before our preservation. And I hope this will be considered of next Parliam’t, whether I have ye honour to sit there or not.’
The circumstances of the previous reign were now reversed: it was the King’s opponents, and not the crown, who most feared the summoning of a new Parliament. It was the likely prospect of a ‘packed’ Parliament removing the legal barriers to Catholics occupying high office, combined with two other events, the issuing of a second Declaration of Indulgence and the birth of a legitimate male heir, which led some English politicians to take the extraordinary step of inviting a foreign head of state to invade their country.
The announcement of Mary of Modena’s pregnancy in January 1688 touched off a crisis over succession that had been brewing for years between James II and his Protestant subjects. Mary had suffered from a number of miscarriages and it was commonly assumed that the Queen was now barren. The news that she was now with child came as a profound shock to the many who had taken comfort from the fact that James was not in good health, and that on his death the crown would fall to his Protestant daughters. The possibility that the Queen would give birth to a healthy male heir, who, it was assumed, would be raised as a Catholic, dealt a severe blow to the hope that the romanising policies of the King’s reign would be short-lived. Rumours about the pregnancy began to circulate almost immediately. Henry Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, noted on 15 January that ‘the queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true’. Satirical lampoons on the pregnancy began to appear as the beginning of March. Mr Partridge’s wonderful predictions, pro anno 1688 predicted that ‘there is some bawdy project on foot either about buying, selling or procuring a child, or children, for some pious use’ and that ‘some child [is to be] put upon a lawful heir to cheat them out of their right and estate’.
The issue of the Prince of Wales’s paternity was part of the discussions between Protestant politicians in England and William of Orange. The Earl of Devonshire, writing to William on 13 March, reported ominously that ‘the Roman Catholics incline absolutely that it should be a son’ and that ‘it is certain, that we expect great extremities’. Princess Anne, embittered at the threat the child posed to her inheriting her father’s throne, actively encouraged the belief that it was a fraudulent pregnancy, writing to her sister Mary that there was ‘much reason to believe it a false belly. For methinks, if it were not, there having been so many stories and jests made about it, she should, to convince the world make either me, or some of my friends, feel her belly.’ The birth of the prince was officially accompanied with much celebration in newsletters and gazettes, with fireworks set off and bonfires lit. At the same time, however, discussion continued as to whether he was really the King’s son. Narcissus Luttrell reported that ‘People give themselves a great liberty in discoursing about the young Prince, with strange reflections on him, not fit to insert here.’ In a mock dialogue, the Prince of Wales’s nurse told the papal nuncio, ‘O Lord sir, now the whole kingdom laughs at the sham; and there’s never a joiner in town but has a patter of the bedstead; nay, the next Bartholomew Fair they intend to have a droll called “The Tragedy of Perkin Warbeck”.’ Other pamphlets claimed that though the Queen had indeed been pregnant, the father was the papal nuncio himself, the aptly named Ferdinand d’Adda, not James.
Meanwhile, on 27 April 1688 James issued a second Declaration of Indulgence, this time with instructions that it was to be read from the pulpit by all Anglican clergy. The issuing of a second Declaration was in part a response to continued Anglican persecution of nonconformists in the face of the first royal indulgence.74 If the Anglican clergy would not conform to the King’s policy of toleration, it was also hoped that the issuing of a second Declaration would provoke some members of the Church of England into actions that would effectively end any prospect of an alliance between nonconformity and Anglicanism. However, the second Declaration in fact prompted a crucial change of tack by the Anglican hierarchy. Seven bishops, Sancroft, Trelawny of Bristol, Lloyd of St Asaph, Turner of Ely, White of Peterborough, Ken of Bath and Wells and Lake of Chichester, sent forth a petition asking to be excused from reading the Declaration. However, whereas in the reasons against subscription drafted by Sancroft a year earlier there had been obvious digs at the toleration being afforded to nonconformists, here the bishops claimed that their actions stemmed not ‘from any want of due tenderness to Dissenters’. They went on to affirm their support for toleration for fellow Protestants, provided that it was settled by Parliament, not royal prerogative.
James responded to the petition by having the bishops indicted for seditious libel and placed in the Tower. However, his confrontation with the episcopacy backfired. The bishops’ plight elicited considerable public sympathy, and the Anglican pamphleteers were now winning nonconformist converts by raising the possibility of religious toleration (for Protestants) secured by statute. The Anglican prelates even received a visitation from ten dissenting ministers who claimed that they ‘could not but adhear to them as men constant in the Protestant faith’. Furthermore, Whig lawyers, such as Treby and Somers, provided the bishops’ defence counsel. This unusual and, as it would turn out, short-lived alliance between the Whigs, the bishops and the dissenters, was further hastened by the birth of the King’s son on 10 June.
The bishops were acquitted of the charges against them on 30 June, and as the news of the not guilty verdict was spread, a great huzzah erupted ‘and it passed through the Hall extreame loud; so into the yards and to the water side, and along the river, as far as the bridge’.75 The same day Henry Compton, the suspended Bishop of London, and six peers, the Earl of Danby, Richard, Viscount Lumley, Edward Russell, Earl of Orford, Henry Sidney, Earl of Romney, William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire and Charles Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, issued an invitation to William of Orange pledging their support if he brought a force into England against James. The seven promised the Prince that almost all of England was behind him: ‘your Highness may be assured there are nineteen parts of twenty of the people throughout the Kingdom who are desirous of change; and who, we believe, would willingly contribute to it if they had such a protection to countenance their rising as could secure them from being destroyed before they could get to be in a posture able to defend themselves.’
They also predicted that there would be great numbers of deserters to the Prince’s cause from the King’s army. However, this optimism was undercut by the fact that they insisted that William needed to act now in case of the further changes ‘not only to be expected from a packed Parliament, but what the meeting of any Parliament (in our present circumstances) may produce against those, who will be looked upon as principal obstructors of their proceedings there; it being taken for granted that if things cannot then be carried to their wishes in a parliamentary way, other measures will be put in execution by more violent means’.76
The ‘invitation’ also chided William for having sent his congratulations to James II on the birth of his son: ‘The false imposing of that [child] upon the princess and the nation, being not only an infinite exasperation of the people’s minds here, but being certainly one of the chief causes upon which the declaration of your entering the kingdom in a hostile manner must be founded on your part, although many other reasons are to be given on ours.’ William’s agent James Johnstone also encouraged him to air suspicions about the Prince of Wales’s authenticity by sponsoring secretly the publication of pamphlets to this effect. In addition, the allegedly supposititious nature of James’s son formed a large part of the public justification offered for inviting William of Orange to intervene in English affairs.77 Some Jacobites later claimed that this had been a long-standing strategy, to use a royal birth as the pretext of invasion on the grounds that the child was not the King’s. Anne’s absence from her stepmother’s lying-in may also have been a planned attempt to cast doubt on the authenticity of the pregnancy:
Williamite literature claimed that Anne had been sent away ‘on purpose to keep her at a sufficient distance till the scene was over’.78
Given, as we have seen, that James did not seek the forcible reversion of England back to Catholicism and that his aims were limited to securing the political and religious emancipation of Catholics and dissenters, we need to understand why leading English politicians were prepared to commit treason, and risk plunging their country into another civil war, by inviting foreign military intervention. Fundamentally, though James was not bent on establishing himself as absolute monarch of a Catholic state, a number of features of his rule succeeded in giving the impression to others that this was the case.
First, England was experiencing an unprecedented level of militarisation domestically. A large royal standing army was camped on Hounslow Heath, west of London, and in garrison towns like York and Hull the brutality of martial law was imposed on the civilian population. In York ringleaders of a violent clash between the citizens and soldiers were punished by martial law, being made to ride a wooden horse until blood came out of their mouths. Forced labour was conscripted in Hull in the crisis of 1688 to fortify the city’s defences. The rule of martial law effectively indemnified the army from being brought to account for offences against the civilian population. In September 1688, when the mayor of Scarborough complained that he had been ‘tossed in a blanket by the command of Captain Waseley who quarters in that town’, the case was dismissed when the Captain pleaded the royal pardon.79 This increasing militarisation of English society was accompanied by a royal campaign against the carrying of arms by private individuals, driven by James’s well-grounded suspicion of the Whig peerage after the Rye House Plot and Monmouth rebellion. The King instructed Lord Lieutenants in December 1686 to search and seize ‘muskets or guns’ under the terms of the Game Act of 1671. As its name implied, this act had been originally designed to prevent the poaching of game within royal parks and forests by the poor. However, James employed it in a novel way, using an alleged threat to national security to legitimate a far more sweeping and wide-ranging confiscation of firearms in private hands. The general disarmament the King wanted was never properly enforced, but it gave a clear signal about the monarch’s intentions.80
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