The Glorious Revolution

by Edward Vallance

  In 1675 it was said that A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (probably written by John Locke under the instruction of the Earl of Shaftesbury and a severe censure of Charles II’s government and the policies of his chief minister, the Earl of Danby) was the talk of all the coffee-houses. The circulation of this pamphlet seems to have prompted a royal proclamation in December of that year ‘For the Suppression of Coffee Houses’. Among the problems caused by coffee-houses, it mentioned ‘that in such Houses … divers, False, Malicious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of his Majesties Government and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm’. The crown’s attempt to suppress London’s café society failed.62 However, the role of coffee-house owners as intelligencers and spreaders of news meant that they continued to attract the attention of the authorities. In 1678 Chillingworth, master of a coffee-house in Leadenhall Street, together with Kid, keeper of the Amsterdam in Bartholomew Lane, the principal gathering place for Whig sympathisers, and Rebecca Weeden, by the Exchange, were all censured for dispensing letters of false news. Coffee-houses were also suppressed outside of London. In January 1681 orders were issued to shut down the coffee-house of William Pearce at Warminster in Wiltshire as he ‘hath of late made it his dayly practice to expose to the view of the inhabitants divers seditious pamphlets and libells against the government now established in both Church and State’.63

  Suppression during the ‘Tory reaction’ did not prevent coffee-houses from returning as key forums for political discussion during the Glorious Revolution. Already aware that they were becoming venues for distributing Orangist propaganda, James attempted to have them suppressed in October 1688. The greatest public celebration of the coronation of William and Mary took place outside of Watt’s coffee-house on 13 February. During a debate in the Convention on 9 March it was argued that the votes of the Commons may as well be printed as they were common discourse in coffee-houses.64

  It was not only seditious speech or illicit printed libels and pamphlets that these establishments generated. Some periodical publications sprang directly from the coffee-house milieu. John Dunton’s Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury made use of the theological works of Robert Sanderson, Henry Hammond and William Perkins in the novel setting of the problem page. But Dunton’s gazette was more in the vein of ‘Notes and Queries’ than a religious treatise. The publication stemmed directly from the emerging coffee-house culture, as the editor and his collaborators met in Smith’s coffee-house in Stocks Market to compose answers to questions they had received in the post from readers. It was published twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, on both sides of a folio sheet, priced at a penny a copy. The questions raised by readers ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous: ‘Why fish that live in salt water as Whitings etc. taste fresh?’, ‘What’s the reason that some Men have no beards?’ and ‘Why a Horse with a round Fundament emits a square Excrement?’ Aside from dealing with more familiar moral problems, such as whether it was ‘lawful for a man to marry his cousin German [sic]’ or ‘whether a person that is divorced may lawfully marry another, while those they were first marryed to are yet living?’, the Athenian Gazette also touched upon questions of political obedience, such as ‘whether what Dr Sherlock cites out of Bishop Overall’s Convocation-Book, and his other Assertions, be sufficient to Ground an oath of allegiance upon?’ and ‘what is the meaning of the new word “Abdication”?’65 The moral dilemmas of those faced with the choice of giving their allegiance either to James or to William and Mary were being resolved in the pages of a forerunner to the advice column.

  It is clear that by the end of the seventeenth century England had experienced a ‘news revolution’. The range and volume of printed media had expanded dramatically since the 1660s. With coffee-houses springing up in virtually every major town in the country, the spaces for public discussion of the news had also proliferated exponentially. It is important, however, to recognize that this increase in the availability of news, and the obvious exploitation of the press and public opinion by the crown and political parties, does not represent the acceptance by the political elite of the people’s freedom to discuss affairs of state. Secrecy norms continued to officially govern parliamentary proceedings and those, like Henry Sacheverell, whose views challenged political or religious orthodoxy could face severe punishment by the courts. Despite this, all sides, Williamites and Jacobites, saw the absolute necessity of winning over the hearts and minds of the public in the struggle for the British crown.

  The dynastic revolution in England took place with remarkable rapidity and with little blood being spilt. From December 1688 it was being driven by William’s clear wish to accept nothing less than the effective exercise of sole monarchical authority. With both Mary and, later, Anne supporting William’s candidacy, and with the legitimate monarch, James II, having fled the country, there was little alternative for English politicians other than to acquiesce to the Prince’s claim to the throne. Attempts at limiting monarchical authority were undercut by the desire of William and his supporters for a speedy settlement, and by the lack of mechanisms of enforcement being incorporated into the Bill of Rights. However, the need for William to present the image of an English settlement to the nation and Europe as a whole meant that compromises had to be made with both Tory and Whig opinion to an extent that left the exact nature of the Revolution settlement highly contested. On what grounds could William be said to have a right to the English throne? How limited were the powers of the monarchy after 1689? These were questions that were debated not only at Westminster or among the social and political elite, but in pubs and coffee-houses and at home.

  Moreover, this ambiguous Revolution settlement extended only to England and Wales. In Scotland and Ireland the dynastic contest between William and James would be both more emphatic in its constitutional and religious outcomes and far more bloody in its resolution.

  7

  THE REVOLUTION IN SCOTLAND AND IRELAND

  Bar a few minor skirmishes, the Revolution in England had been a largely bloodless affair. The absence of armed conflict would later form an important part of the mythology of the ‘sensible revolution’ (a mythology which glossed over the overtly martial nature of William’s ‘expedition’). However, in James II’s other kingdoms of Ireland and Scotland, the Revolution unleashed waves of warfare, sectarian violence and bloody clan rivalry, and was characterised by far more explicit (and thereby far more divisive) political and religious settlements. The revolutionary wars in Ireland and Scotland featured examples of great bravery: the obstinate defence made by the besieged Protestants of Londonderry; and of great perfidy: the brutal slaughter of the men, women and children of clan MacDonald at Glencoe. The scars left by these wars and the exclusive nature of the settlements in Scotland and Ireland helped to create and sustain Jacobitism as a force that would seriously threaten the Protestant succession in Britain up to its military defeat at Culloden in 1746. In Ireland the post-Revolution establishment of Protestant hegemony, in flagrant breach of the peace terms negotiated between Williamites and Jacobites, had an even further-reaching impact, dividing Irish society sharply along sectarian lines and consigning the majority of its population to the status of second-class citizens.

  As king of Scotland and Ireland, James II pursued policies that shared clear objectives with those that he initiated in England. Again, in his other kingdoms, James’s overriding aim was to secure the religious and political emancipation of his Catholic subjects. The methods that he used to do this were also basically the same as those deployed in England: the exploitation of his prerogative powers to dispense with laws barring Catholics from holding civil, ecclesiastic and military office, the ‘packing’ of the Irish and Scottish Parliaments in order to ensure the statutory repeal of penal legislation against Catholics, and the issuing of edicts of toleration for both Catholic and Protestant dissenters. These measures were accompanied, as in James’s southe
rn kingdoms, with words and actions that often raised fears of arbitrary government (even if, as in England, this was expressly not the monarch’s stated aim). Yet though some aspects of his other kingdoms might have raised James’s hopes of success (in Scotland the less independent nature of Parliament and the loyalty of the Highland clans; in Ireland the fact that the majority of the population were Catholics), these different contexts also meant that advocating the same policies in all three kingdoms did not mean getting the same outcome in England, Scotland and Ireland. In particular, the stark contrast in religious make-up between Scotland and Ireland meant that James’s aim of emancipating his Catholic subjects was seen as too extreme and too limited, respectively.

  James was proclaimed James VII, King of Scotland, on 10 February 1685, breaking with tradition by failing to take the part of the coronation oath which obliged him to defend the Protestant religion. As in England, there was evidence of popular joy at his accession: ‘Never King succeeded to a throne more with the love and esteem of his subjects than your Majesty,’ observed the earl of Balcarres.1 The new King himself felt that exercising his rule in Scotland would be easier than in England. Having spent a long time in exile in his northern kingdom during the Exclusion Crisis, James II was probably, after his grandfather James I and VI, the Stuart monarch with the greatest contacts in Scotland. This greater knowledge of Scottish affairs led James to believe that he would be more able to rule alone here than in England, given the comparative weakness of the Scottish Parliament. This was reflected in his decision to call a Scottish Parliament before the English one of 23 April 1685. James’s faith in the loyalty of this institution appeared to be rewarded when it voted the king a very generous financial settlement, granting the crown excise revenues in perpetuity, along with voting other sources of income to the royal purse calculated to total £60,000. This financial settlement was followed by the passage of a series of acts which one historian described as the ‘Nuremberg decrees of seventeenth-century Scotland’.2 James’s first Parliament declared war on those who attended ‘field conventicles’, unofficial outdoor Presbyterian meetings, making it a capital offence not only to go to such meetings but also to harbour those who did. Further statutes made it a treasonable offence to refuse to give evidence in treason trials, indemnified royal officers against suits and complaints made against actions carried out under the royal seal and placed the lives and property of James’s male subjects aged from sixteen to sixty at the ultimate disposal of the crown. The draconian nature of these laws was intensified by the strong insinuation that they were not the product of parliamentary deliberation but rather created by the King’s absolute prerogative. The preamble to the Excise Act affirmed that these laws were made by the King’s ‘sacred, supreme and absolute power’ and promised ‘the hearty and sincere offer’ of his subjects’ ‘lives and fortunes to assist, support, defend and maintain King James the seventh … against all mortals’. James congratulated the Duke of Queensberry, commissioner for the estates, on the success of the Parliament, which he said would ‘be a very good precedent to the English one’.3

  This harsh policy against conventiclers has been justified on the grounds that the Cameronians, the extreme wing of the Scottish Presbyterians, were effectively terrorists bent on the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, and as a consequence could scarcely be tolerated. Certainly the threat of armed covenanter rebellion was real, and in the Sanquhar Declaration published in June 1680 (a year after the defeat of Presbyterian rebels at Bothwell Bridge), the Cameronians had declared war on Charles II as a tyrant and covenant breaker, and disowned their new overlord in Scotland, his brother James, then Duke of York.4 However, it was also the case that James’s government used the reality of Cameronian extremism as a means to persecute all Presbyterians, including moderates who usually attended church, had little to do with house conventicles and disassociated themselves from field conventiclers. Presbyterians of this ilk were subject nonetheless to rigorous fines and periodic quartering of troops.5 To be sure, emotive histories of the so-called ‘killing time’, like some treatments of the Bloody Assizes, may lose a sense of the generally brutal responses of Tudor and Stuart governments to sedition or the mere threat of it. However, there can be little doubt that some of the crown’s agents, in particular the notorious John Graham of Claverhouse, took a sadistic pleasure in enforcing the new hard line against conventiclers.

  Claverhouse was a professional soldier who had taken part in the battle of Bothwell Bridge and played an active part in Monmouth’s removal from Scottish command on the grounds of his leniency to the defeated rebels. He was made a Privy Councillor by James in 1685, a major general in 1686, Provost of Dundee in 1688 and, after the Dutch invasions, Viscount Claverhouse. Graham was placed in charge of raiding parties against conventiclers, showing no mercy against ringleaders ‘lest’, he said, ‘rebellion be thought cheap here’. In May 1685 he summarily executed John Brown, shot dead after being discovered with arms in his house. Claverhouse reported: ‘I caused to shoot him dead, which he suffered very inconcernedly.’6 In the same month Dunottar Castle was commandeered as a new fortress to keep the growing numbers of captured conventiclers – it was reported that in one dungeon 110 men and women were kept in near darkness. Argyll’s ill-fated rebellion was as fiercely repressed as that undertaken by Monmouth south of the border. Government troops were ordered to ‘either kill or apprehend all those who joined with the late Argile against the king’. Argyll himself, like Monmouth, was executed without trial, following an act of attainder. One English rebel who joined Argyll’s rising was returned to his home town in boiled and tarred quarters.7

  As in England, the rebellion was used as a pretext to bring Catholics into the civil and military administration in Scotland. The Earl of Dumbarton was made commander in chief of the Scottish army and a further twenty-six Catholics, including the Duke of Gordon and the Earl of Seaforth, were appointed as commissioners of the excise. To Scottish Presbyterians these appointments represented a clear breach of James’s promise before Parliament to defend the ‘Religion as established by law’. Government was placed further in the hands of Catholics by the politic conversions of the Drummond brothers, the Earls of Perth and Melfort, who initiated a steady campaign against Queensberry. Perth had flagrantly flouted Scottish law (attendance at mass was a criminal offence carrying the death penalty for the third offence) by opening a Catholic chapel in Edinburgh. The Drummonds attempted to implicate Queensberry in anti-Catholic demonstrations, having an Edinburgh fencing master put to death when he refused to give false evidence that Queensberry had been involved in these disturbances. The King was behind the policy to suppress anti-Catholic preaching in Scotland, as he had been in England. The apparent romanising policies of James brought stern reactions from Protestant ministers, one preacher being silenced after declaring that he ‘would as soon believe that the moon was made of green cheese as in transubstantiation’. When James Glen, a bookseller, received an order not to sell any anti-Catholic books, ‘he answered the Masters of the Privy Counsell, that he had one book in his shop which condemned Popery very directly, and he desired to know if he might sell it, meaning the Bible’.8 These attempts at censoring anti-popish sermons and books provoked further Protestant reaction, including anti-Catholic rioting in Edinburgh on 24 January 1686 as apprentices insulted Catholics leaving the house of a priest, calling them papist dogs. On 31 January the same house was stoned during a communion service, and Perth’s wife, who was in attendance, was pelted with mud. The ringleader of the mob was arrested and ordered to be flogged through the streets of Edinburgh on 1 February but was rescued by the crowd as the punishment was being carried out. The government’s reaction to these anti-Catholic riots and demonstrations had reached outright paranoia. Hugh Maxwell was imprisoned for, as it turned out, completely uncontroversial marginal annotations he had made on theological works in a shorthand that was indecipherable and (so the Privy Council reasoned) must be seditious. He was kept in prison f
or seventeen months before it was confirmed that the notes were harmless.9

  It seems hard to reconcile the legislation passed in the first session of James’s Scottish Parliament, and the harsh enforcement of it, with his apparent life-long commitment to the idea of religious toleration. Here it is important to consider another element of the King’s personal belief system, his almost pathological hatred of disloyalty. The Protestant dissenters to whom James appeared to be most ready to grant toleration, both in England and in his other kingdoms, were those, like the Quakers and Baptists, who adopted a quietist approach and retreated from involvement in public life.10 These groups represented a small yet significant minority in early modern England. In Scotland, however, such sects were represented by tiny numbers of followers, whereas the majority of those outside the worship of the Church of Scotland were Presbyterians who had been implicated in fomenting rebellion against the crown from the reign of James II’s great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, onwards. These differences in the religious make-up of the two kingdoms had serious repercussions for the success of James’s project to repeal the tests and penal laws.