Despite the use of such equivocations, and the blandishments of government spokesmen who encouraged subscription in a limited sense, the issue of giving allegiance to William continued to trouble individuals long after 1689 and even split families. Although the oaths might have been framed to ease tender consciences, the obligation upon clergy to say loyal prayers for the King and Queen made a further test of allegiance. In 1702 Susanna Wesley, mother of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote to Lady Yarborough to ask for her help in a terrible situation. One night at family prayers her husband Samuel noticed that Susanna ‘did not say “Amen” to his prayer for k[ing] W[illiam] as I usually do to all others’. In response to this expression of political defiance, Samuel ‘kneeled down and imprecated the divine vengeance upon himself and all his posterity if he ever touched me more or came into a bed with me before I had begged God’s pardon and his for not saying “Amen” to his prayer for the k[in]g’. Susanna tried to persuade him otherwise: ‘I’ve unsuccessfully represented to him the unlawfulness and unreasonableness of his oath: that the man in that case has no more power over his own body than the woman over hers: that since I’m willing to let him quietly enjoy his opinions he ought not to deprive me of my little liberty of conscience.’
Samuel made arrangements to separate from his wife and six children by enlisting as ship’s chaplain on a man-of-war. In the meantime Lady Yarborough referred Susanna to George Hickes, a non-juring divine. He assured her that her husband’s oath was a rash one and ‘wholly contrary to the prior obligation of his marriage promise and the relative duties of a husband resulting from thence. It was perjury of him to make it, and it will be perjury for him to persist in the performance of it.’ But this was not the view of Samuel, who apparently said that ‘if we have two kings we must have two beds’.45
Of course, although the oaths were tendered to more individuals than originally intended, this was largely a debate which concerned the clergy. Indeed, there was evidence that public opinion was losing patience with clerical prevarication over giving allegiance to William and Mary.46 It has been argued that, in general, below the level of the gentry, the English public were essentially uninterested in the outcome of the Revolution and that certainly the political elite made little attempt to court them.47 Unquestionably it is possible to find examples of the staggering disregard, and often overt distaste, that those in power had for the middling and poorer sort. Famous Whigs such as Daniel Defoe and John Locke were keen advocates of child labour to curb the increase in the ‘idle poor’. Defoe was delighted to find that around Halifax ‘hardly anything above four years old’ was unemployed. Locke, the founder of English liberalism, urged the establishment of work schools for poor children above the age of three so that youths should no longer by ‘maintained in idleness’ in their infancy and their labour ‘lost to the public till they are twelve or fourteen years old’.48 The post-Revolutionary penal code grew ever more draconian in its treatment of crimes against property to secure the land and possessions of the haves from the grasping hands of the have-nots. In 1688 around fifty crimes were punishable by death but by 1800 about two hundred were deemed capital offences.49
Many factors of life in the late seventeenth century militated against the lower classes developing a political consciousness of their own. Especially in rural areas, many were illiterate, with even those who occupied minor public offices, such as churchwardens, overseers of the poor and so on, often unable even to write their own names. The rural communities in which most of the population still lived were also isolated and when those within spoke of ‘the country’ they usually meant their own parish and its immediate environs rather than the nation. Church, State and school worked together to instil into the masses values of obedience to social and political superiors. Beyond this intellectual conditioning there were plenty of ‘safety valves’ in English society after 1689 which ensured that social tensions did not spill over into overt opposition to authority or rebellion. Alcohol was one, with fairs such as Bartholomew Fair in London becoming so notorious in the 1690s for the consumption of drink that the authorities made several attempts to curb its activities. Theatre, too, according to John Dennis in 1698, diverted ‘mens minds from thoughts of rebellion or disobedience’.50 Moreover, the regular Parliaments and elections of William’s reign gave many opportunities for the increasing number who met the forty-shilling threshold for the vote to air their political voices, if only for the Whig and Tory parties, which essentially served the wealthy, landed classes.
However, this picture of ordinary men and women in the post-Revolutionary period as being essentially apolitical needs serious revision. Research has shown that even as early as the reign of James I, England had a thriving ‘news culture’ which fed the public appetite for information on current affairs. In the 1620s members of the provincial gentry, such as John Rous, paid individuals known as ‘intelligencers’ to send them information from the capital on political events. For poorer social groups the same function was often performed by word of mouth as travelling tinkers or peddlers would hawk not only their goods but also the latest titbits of information from London to their customers. In a less formal way private correspondence that reflected upon the news was often copied and circulated in manuscript. Printed news-sheets mirrored these manuscript productions but by the 1640s had far exceeded them in terms of the volume of material generated. The illiterate were not excluded from this burgeoning news culture. Literate members of the community would often read aloud pamphlets and news-sheets for the benefit of those who could not. Moreover, much information was originally conveyed in oral form, as ballads or verse libels, or simply through conversation in sites popular for the exchange of news, such as St Paul’s Walk in London. This oral discussion often formed the basis for printed or manuscript material.51
This news culture, which both James II and his brother Charles II had attempted to censor and control, was rapidly resuscitated during the Glorious Revolution, as political chaos and the propaganda needs of the differing factions loosened state restrictions on the press. Aside from the revival of mass petitioning and the illicit reporting of votes and debates in the Convention, there was a huge expansion in the number of cheap weekly newspapers. Titles such as the Orange Gazette, the Harllum Currant, the London Courant, the London Intelligence, the London Mercury, the English Currant, the Universal Intelligence, jostled for space alongside the official London Gazette, which continued to supply an official spin on events but this time told from the perspective of the Williamite court. Prints of William were also produced before the meeting of the Convention Parliament which glossed over the Prince’s rather unappealing physical make-up – his short stature, spindly legs, little feet, crooked back, huge, beak-like nose and black teeth – and emphasised instead his personal virtues and military prowess.
By the end of the seventeenth century as much as 70 per cent of the adult male population may have been able to read. Even for the illiterate, however, there was an increasing number of avenues through which the news could be distributed by word of mouth. The public spaces for discussing and disseminating news of current events were expanding during the seventeenth century and becoming more socially inclusive. Two key places where the public gathered to hear the latest goings-on at court or in Parliament were the pub and the coffee-house.52 Consumption of beer remained high after the Restoration, despite competition, as we will see, from newer stimulants. According to the statistician Gregory King, in 1695 about 28 per cent of annual per capita expenditure in England was devoted to ale and beer. The clientele of the ale-house remained distinctly lower-class. Writing in the 1690s, Anthony Burnaby argued that the victuallers’ trade was supported by the ‘more inferrior part … as tailors, weavers, smiths, bricklayers … labourers … drovers of cattle, carters, coachmen, porters and journeymen of all sorts’. Women were customers of the alehouses, too, though they were usually expected to come only with their husbands. However, drinking dens were not solely the pres
erve of the plebeian orders. In Oxford in the 1670s it was reported that members of Balliol College were habitués of a nearby tippling establishment ‘fit for none but draymen and tinker’ and here ‘continually lie and by perpetual bubbing add art to their natural stupidity to make themselves perfect sots’. Samuel Pepys was an inveterate frequenter of pubs, in November 1664 recording that he put on a ‘poor black suit’ and went with Bagwell’s wife ‘to a blind alehouse and there I did caress her and eat and drank’.
Yet, far from being places where the lower orders could anaesthetise themselves against the cruelties of everyday life and let off steam in harmless, drunken revelry, alehouses were often the settings for seditious talk among the labouring poor. Heated by alcohol, men and women discussed the claims to the throne of William or James over their cups and hurled accusations of treason or sedition at one another. The term ‘seditious words’ refers only to verbal expressions, not to writing, which was seditious libel.53 The evidence that we can gather from cases brought for speaking seditious words is not without its problems and it is likely that some prosecutions were politically motivated. In post-Revolutionary Norwich the mayor, Thomas Cooke, rigorously prosecuted a number of such cases in an effort to ingratiate himself with the Williamite regime. Joseph Smith, a labourer of the city, alleged before Cooke that having gone ‘to drinke a pott of Beer at his Master Cromes seller in St Gregory p[ar]ish’, his drinking companions fell to ‘discourse of King William’, one ‘William Symonds saying, “God Bliss King William King of England. God of the first place saved us, And King William in the next place saved all our Lives.”’ However, another drinker, Robert Poynter ‘replyed and said that King William was none of the King of England but a Deputy and fitt for no better And that he did nott Question but once in a moneths time to see a hundred such Rogues as the s[ai]d Informant was should be hanged for speaking ag[a]inst King James’. Barnard Barratt, another customer in Crome’s cellar that day, reported that Poynter had said that ‘King William was but an Elective King and that the Late King James would be here againe within halfe a yeare’. Symonds’s information was even more damning, reporting that Poynter had claimed ‘that he had rather be und[e]r the power of the Devill then und[e]r the presbeterian [meaning Williamite] Goverment’. Poynter admitted that he had described William as an elective king but denied that he had said that Smith and Symonds would be hanged when James returned. It may be that a mere expression of political judgement on the part of Poynter, albeit an injudicious one, that William was an ‘elective’, not a hereditary monarch, had been transformed by the zeal of the mayor into something that could be prosecuted as an act of sedition.54
Alehouse keepers, as well as their customers, could find themselves in trouble. At Epiphany Quarter Sessions in Buckinghamshire Ralph Lacey was fined £5 for ‘speaking scandalous words against the King and Queen’, his alehouse at Princes Risborough was suppressed and he was fined a further 3s and 4d for keeping a ‘disorderley alehouse’.55 The growing social respectability of alehouse keepers often led them to become informers against their fractious customers in order to preserve good relations with local authorities, this in turn resulting in their becoming targets for mob violence themselves, as in London (1720), Norwich (1731) Shoreditch (1736), Sundridge (1734) and Tiverton (1738).56
In private homes, too, alcohol acted to loosen tongues and embolden its imbibers to make seditious statements. On 18 August 1691 William West of Atworth in Wiltshire, a baker, alleged that ‘upon a certain Sunday about a moneth past, being Box revells he was in the house of John Cottle of Box where was present one Thomas Hibbert of Bath’. West asserted that ‘the said Hibbert taking a glass of beer severall times in his hands began and drank severall healths to ye late King James saying withall our present King William was brought in to England with a East wind and was driven out again by a West wind [probably a reference to the King’s going to Ireland] as ye locusts were from off the earth. And this informant further saieth that Hibbert spoke severall approbrious words against the present King and Queen and their government.’ Cottle admitted the presence of the two men in his house but denied hearing of this conversation and stated that he always urged his guests ‘not to talke of ye government’.57
Some of the remarks ascribed to those convicted of speaking seditious words display a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of politics and political ideas. Peter Webb, a nailer from Wolverhampton, demonstrated considerable knowledge of hereditary right when in December 1689, while carol singing in Albrighton in Shropshire, he told a weaver friend that ‘wee ought to live in a rule and obedience under Kinge James as well as where hee is as if hee were amongst us & that hee that is yor King Meaninge Kinge William is a Usurper to the Crowne, & has noe more to Doe with [it] then I have’. In this brief statement Webb had distilled almost the entirety of the non-jurors’ arguments for refusing to give allegiance to William III. Some of the convicted had got into trouble by exploring the full implications of the de facto theory often used to support William’s title. Margaret Steene, a Roman Catholic of Burslem in Staffordshire and wife of a yeoman, or gentleman farmer, was asked by her neighbour in 1689 to return a shearing hook that had been loaned to her. Steene replied that if she had the hook ‘she would keepe it by the same Right as King William kept his Crowne, ffor itt was none of his owne for he was an outcomling [a stranger or foreigner] a Rouge [sic] & A Bastard, And that they would have his head as soone as the [sic] Could’. Others demonstrated knowledge of the lack of constitutional propriety in the way that the Convention Parliament had been summoned. In Wiltshire an unnamed individual was committed to prison for saying that ‘the present majesties [William and Mary] are not lawfully King and Queen and that the present Parliament is not a Parliament but a parcel of fools met together who make themselves a Parliament’.58
Just as important as these political arguments to the content of seditious speech were the personal politics of the Revolution. William was often described in recorded seditious speech as a ‘rogue’, meaning that he was a thief who had stolen the crown. Simon Lynch, a gentleman of St Andrew’s, Holborn, and probably Irish, was fined and imprisoned in 1690 for saying King William was ‘a Rogue & a Sonne of a Whore & that he took his father’s Right from him’. Others spoke of William’s criminality in more literal terms. Rumours circulated that William had stolen treasures from royal palaces and sent them to the Netherlands. Robert Jefferson of Hexham in Northumberland was accused in 1689 of saying that the Prince of Orange had purloined King James’s ‘rich Hangings’ and that he had ‘Rob’d Whitehall of King James Plait & had Smelted itt and some of itt had Coyned into money and the rest he made into Piggs Like Lead and sent into Holland’.59 The fact that William had taken his father-in-law’s title was often alluded to in Jacobite propaganda and seditious words accusations, his act making the Prince of Orange guilty of the crime of petty treason. Henry Ellyott of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, whose words begin this chapter, was pilloried five times, fined and imprisoned for calling William ‘a Sone of a Whore’ who ate the ‘bread out of his fathers mouth’. Casting doubt on William’s paternity threw back in their faces the Whigs’ accusations concerning the Prince of Wales’s birth.60
It was not the demon drink alone that loosened tongues and enflamed political passions. A voguish new beverage, coffee, also appeared to stimulate and enliven talk of the news. According to the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, the first English coffee-house was established in that city in 1650 by one of the Jews readmitted into England by Oliver Cromwell. A few years later the owner relocated to London and opened a coffee-house in Holborn. By the late seventeenth century there were nearly eight thousand coffee-houses in London. John Macky, a Scottish visitor to the capital, noted that they were nearly always full in the evening. By the period of the Exclusion Crisis it was estimated that a hundred tunnes of coffee were consumed in England each year and most cities and boroughs in England had coffee-houses of their own. These catered for a variety of political opinions, wit
h Tories meeting at the Cocoa Tree and Osinda’s and Whigs in the Coffee House of Saint James.61 Historians have seen coffee-houses as part of a burgeoning ‘public sphere’, providing a ‘forum where even the socially humble could have access to the latest pamphlets and newspapers’. But coffee-houses also had their secretive, closed side as well. The Grecian coffee-house in Devereux Court doubled as both a meeting place for members of the Royal Society, including Newton, Sir Hans Sloane and Edmond Halley, and for secret meetings of radical Whigs and commonwealthsmen like Walter Moyle and John Trenchard, who gathered to produce anti-standing-army tracts. Even so, coffee-houses were remarkably socially inclusive establishments. One seventeenth-century commentator stated that a ‘coffee-house is free to all comers, so [long as] they have human shape’. In a time of rising prices for beer and wine, which pushed out poorer customers, coffee-houses offered cheap refreshment as well as newspapers and gazettes to read.
Coffee-houses, even more than alehouses, were identified as hotbeds of political discourse. As early as 1661 Anthony Wood was complaining about the effect that coffee-houses had had upon the intellectual life of Oxford. Scholarly topics had given place to ‘nothing but news, and the affairs of Christendome is discoursed off and that also generally at coffee houses’. In the late 1690s the minister of Epworth in Lincolnshire told his neighbour, Abraham de la Pryme, that when he had been in London he knew a parrot who was sent to a coffee-house and within six months ‘could say nothing but “Bring a dish of coffy”, “Where’s the news?”, and such like’. The English state quickly turned its attentions upon the political debates taking place in English coffee-houses. The Cromwellian protectorate appears to have employed spies to monitor coffee-houses, despite the infancy of the trade. The Earl of Clarendon reported discussions with Charles II concerning coffee-houses as early as 1666 in which the King complained of the freedom of speech allowed there.
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