CHAPTER V

THE SECRET

Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was an intimate friend of Edward Coleman,

secretary to the Duchess of York. At the time of the murder Coleman

lay in Newgate under an accusation of treason, and had so lain for

a fortnight. He was therefore never examined on the subject of his

friend’s death. The omission was unfortunate, for Coleman could

probably have thrown some light upon the nature of the magistrate’s

end.[269] It was constantly said, and the statement has often been

repeated, that when Oates left a copy of his information with Godfrey

on September 27, Godfrey at once wrote to Coleman an account of the

charges contained in it to give the Duke of York warning of the coming

storm.[270] The story was extensively used by those who wished to prove

that Godfrey had been murdered by the supporters of the Plot, or that

he had committed suicide from fear of a parliamentary inquiry into his

conduct. He had not only this reason for fear, urged L’Estrange, but he

had concealed the fact of Oates’ discovery to him for nearly a whole

month; this was the meaning of Godfrey’s enigmatical expressions of

apprehension, and his fear, combined with constitutional melancholy,

drove him to take his own life.[271] Whether or no he suffered from

depression is not a question of importance, since it has been proved

that he did not commit suicide, but was murdered. The rest of the

argument is equally unsound. When Godfrey took Oates’ first deposition

on September 6, he had no copy of the information left with him and

knew that it had already been communicated to the government.[272] As

for the fact that Godfrey had sent an account of Oates’ revelations

to the Duke of York, it would be absurd to suppose that plans of

vengeance were harboured against him on this score, for the duke had

been acquainted with the matter since August 31, when the forged

letters were sent to Bedingfield at Windsor, so that the information

he received from Godfrey was unimportant.[273] As this was a fact of

which the Lord Treasurer was perfectly aware, the suggestions of North

and Warner, the Jesuit provincial, that Godfrey had been threatened and

finally dispatched by order of Danby, on account of his officiousness

in making a communication to the duke, fall to the ground at the same

time.[274] Taken in this sense the words in which Godfrey foreshadowed

his doom are meaningless. He had assured Mr. Robinson that he believed

he should be the first martyr. “I do not fear them,” he added, “if they

come fairly, and I shall not part with my life tamely.” He declared

to Burnet his belief that he would be knocked on the head. To his

sister-in-law he said, “If any danger be, I shall be the first shall

suffer.” He had told one Mr. Wynnel that he was master of a dangerous

secret, which would be fatal to him. “Oates,” he said, “is sworn and is

perjured.”[275] Clearly Godfrey was labouring under an apprehension of

quite definite character. He was in possession of secret information

concerning Oates’ discovery and believed that it would cost him his

life. What this secret was is now to seek. The nature of it must show

why danger was to be apprehended and from what quarter.

The statement that Godfrey wrote to Coleman to acquaint him with Oates’

accusations is not quite correct. Burnet notes: “It was generally

believed that Coleman and he were long in a private conversation,

between the time of his (Coleman’s) being put in the messenger’s hands

and his being made a close prisoner.”[276] Such a conversation in

fact took place, though it was earlier than Burnet thought. Coleman

surrendered to the warrant against him on Monday, September 30.[277]

Two days before he came to the house of Mr. George Welden, a common

friend of himself and the magistrate. Welden sent his servant to

Godfrey’s house with the message that one Clarke wanted to speak to

him. It was the form arranged between them for use when Godfrey was in

company and Coleman wished to see him. Godfrey went to Mr. Welden’s

and there had an interview with Coleman. “When Mr. Coleman and Sir

Edmondbury were together at my house,” said Welden, “they were reading

papers.”[278] It can hardly be doubted what these papers were. The date

was Saturday, September 28, the day on which Godfrey had taken Oates’

deposition. In that Oates had made charges of the most serious nature

against Coleman; and Coleman was Godfrey’s friend. The papers can

scarcely have been other than Godfrey’s copy of the deposition. Godfrey

had probably sent at once to Coleman to tell him what had passed. This

much may be gathered from the reports of letters which he was said to

have sent to Coleman and the Duke of York. Coleman then met him at

Welden’s house, and together they went through Oates’ information,

“Oates,” said Godfrey, “is sworn and is perjured.” This alone was

hardly a secret so dangerous as to make him fear for his life. Many

believed it. It was not an uncommon thing to say. The most grievous

consequence that could ensue would be to gain the reputation of a

“bloody papist,” and possibly to be threatened with implication in the

Plot. Such an opinion could not conceivably lead to fears of assaults

by night and secret assassination. But there was one particular in

which knowledge of Oates’ perjury might be very dangerous indeed.

No doubt Coleman pointed out Oates’ long tale of lies through many

articles of his deposition. There was one which he certainly would not

omit. The cardinal point in the Plot, according to Oates’ revelation,

was a Jesuit congregation held on April 24, 1678 at the White Horse

Tavern in the Strand, where means were concerted for the king’s

assassination. At all the trials of the Jesuits Oates came forward to

give evidence to this point. It was of the first importance. Oates’

statement was false. No congregation had met on that day at the White

Horse Tavern. His perjury is more easy to prove here than in most other

particulars, for it is certain that the Jesuit congregation was held

on April 24 in a different place. It was held at St. James’ Palace,

the residence of the Duke of York. More than five years afterwards

James II let out the secret to Sir John Reresby.[279] Up to that

time it had been well guarded. It was of the utmost consequence that

the fact should not be known. Had it been discovered, the discredit

into which Oates would have fallen would have been of little moment

compared to the extent of the gain to the Whig and Protestant party.

To Shaftesbury the knowledge would have meant everything. Witnesses of

the fact would certainly have been forthcoming, and James’ reception

of the Jesuits in his home was a formal act of high treason. The

Exclusion bill would have been unnecessary. James would have been

successfully impeached and would have been lucky to escape with his

head upon his shoulders. Charles would hardly have been able to

withstand the outcry for the recognition of the Protestant duke as

heir to the throne, the Revolution would never have come to pass, and

the English throne might to this day support a bastard Stuart line

instead of the legitimate Hanoverian dynasty. Besides the Duke of York

and the Jesuit party one man only was acquainted with this stupendous

fact. It is hardly credible that Godfrey met Coleman on September 28,

1678 with any other object than to discuss with him the charges made

by Oates. Still less is it credible that Coleman failed to point out

Oates’ perjury in this matter. It need not be supposed that a definite

statement passed from him. A hint would have sufficed. In some way,

it may be conjectured, Coleman disclosed to the magistrate that which

he should have concealed. Such understandings are abrupt in origin

but swift in growth. Beyond doubt the secret, the shadow of which

Godfrey saw stretching across the line of his life, was that the Jesuit

congregation of April 24 had been held in the house and under the

patronage of the Duke of York.[280]

And hence arose the perplexity and depression of mind from which he

is said to have suffered during the last days of his life. He was

possessed of information which, if published, would infallibly ruin

the cause of the Duke of York and of the Catholics, to whom he was

friendly. It had come to him in private from his friend, and to use

it might seem an act almost of treachery. Yet with these sentiments

Godfrey’s duty as a magistrate was in absolute conflict. It was

undoubtedly his business at once to communicate his knowledge to the

government. Not only was it illegal not to do so, and highly important

that such a weighty fact should not escape detection, but Godfrey

found himself at the centre of the investigation of Oates’ discovery,

and to reveal his news was probably the only way of exposing Oates’

perjury. Nor did Godfrey underestimate the danger into which this

knowledge brought him. He feared that he would be assassinated. The

Jesuits were confronted with the fact that a secret of unbounded value

to their enemies had come into the hands of just one of the men who

could not afford, however much he might wish, to retain it. Godfrey

was, by virtue of his position as justice of the peace, a government

official. He might take time to approach the point of revealing his

information, but sooner or later he would assuredly reveal it. All the

tremendous consequences which would ensue could not then be prevented

or palliated. The only possible remedy was to take from Godfrey the

power of divulging the secret. His silence must be secured, and it

could only be made certain by the grave. To the suggestion that the

motive to the crime was not sufficient, it need only be answered that

at least nine men preferred to die a horrible and ignominious death

rather than prove their innocence and purchase life by telling the

facts.[281] Godfrey’s death was no ludicrous act of stupid revenge, but

a clear-headed piece of business. It was a move in the game which was

played in England between parties and religions, and which dealt with

issues graver than those of life and death.

So far the matter is clear. Sir Edmund Godfrey was an intolerable

obstacle to the Jesuit party. He was in possession of a secret the

disclosure of which would utterly ruin them. He recognised himself that

his life was in danger and went in expectation of being assassinated.

His murder was, like Charles the First’s execution, a cruel necessity.

Two men gave evidence as to his death. The one, Bedloe, contradicted

himself beyond belief. Nevertheless he was able to recognise and accuse

the other, Prance, whose minute and consistent descriptions of time

and place mark him as a partner in the crime. The inference therefore

is sound that, as Bedloe accused correctly a man whom he knew by sight

and not by name, some of the men whose names he gave directly in his

account of the murder were probably the real criminals. These were

Le Fevre, the Jesuit confessor of the queen, Charles Walsh, a Jesuit

attached to the household of Lord Bellasis, and Charles Pritchard, a

third member of the Society of Jesus. With them were associated the

Roman Catholic silversmith, Miles Prance, whom Bedloe recognised as

the man whom he had taken for a waiter in the queen’s chapel, and

a servant of Lord Bellasis, whom he named as Mr. Robert Dent.[282]

Strictly, it is only a matter of conjecture that these men undertook

the deed, but it is supported by considerable probability. They were

singularly unfitted for the task. Godfrey had to be killed and his

corpse to be disposed in such a way that the crime might not be traced

to its true source. The men to do this were not professional criminals.

They did not know, what constant experience has demonstrated, that

the most apparently simple crimes are the hardest to bring home to

their authors. Their proper course was to waylay the magistrate in

the darkness of a narrow street, strip his body of every article of

value, and leave it to be supposed that the murder had been committed

for a vulgar robbery. Instead of this they determined to dispose the

corpse in such a way that Godfrey might be thought to have committed

suicide. The disposal would need time, and to gain the time necessary

it was needful that they should choose a spot to which they could have

free access, and where they would be undisturbed. As the most secret

spot known to them they chose exactly that which they should have most

avoided, the queen’s palace, Somerset House. To decoy Godfrey was not

difficult, for, contrary to the practice of the day, he went abroad

habitually without a servant.[283] The court of Somerset House was

not, as the Duke of York afterwards declared in his memoirs, crowded

with people; on the contrary, it was understood that the queen was

private, and orders were given that visitors were not to be admitted

in their coaches.[284] The queen’s confessor and his friends however

could doubtless secure an entrance. Here Godfrey was murdered, and in

Somerset House his body remained for four nights. In what place it

was kept cannot be decided. Hill’s lodgings were certainly not used.

Perhaps the spot chosen was the room in the same passage where Prance

said that the body had lain during one night.[285] The drops of white

wax which Burnet afterwards saw must have here been spilt upon the

dead man’s clothes. Godfrey himself never used wax candles.[286] On

Wednesday night the body was removed from Somerset House and carried

to the field in which it was found. That it was not taken through the

gate is made certain by the sentries’ evidence. It must therefore have

been carried through a private door. Thence it was taken in a carriage

to the foot of Primrose Hill; marks of coach wheels were seen in the

ground leading towards the spot in a place where coaches were not used

to be driven.[287] Godfrey’s sword was driven through his body, and the

corpse was left lying in the ditch, where it was found next day.

In lodgings near Wild House lived four men. Two of them were Le Fevre

and Walsh, parties to the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey; the others were

Captain William Bedloe, “the discoverer of the Popish Plot,” and his

coadjutor, Charles Atkins. Atkins had declared before the secretary of

state that he lodged at Holborn, but Bedloe let the truth appear in his

examination. As it was a slip, which he immediately tried to cover,

and he was far from bringing it forward as a point in his favour,

his statement may be accepted.[288] Bedloe was thus in daily contact

with two of the criminals. He was on terms of intimacy with them.

They went about in his company and confided in him enough to allow

him to be present at secret celebration of the mass.[289] From this

quarter Bedloe’s information was derived. It is easy to conjecture

how he could have obtained it. Walsh and Le Fevre were absent from

their lodgings for a considerable part of the nights of Saturday and

Wednesday, October 12 and 16. Bedloe’s suspicions must have been

aroused, and either by threats or cajolery he wormed part of the secret

out of his friends. He obtained a general idea of the way in which the

murder had been committed and of the persons concerned in it. One of

these was a frequenter of the queen’s chapel whom he knew by sight. He

thought him to be a subordinate official there. If he went afterwards

to the chapel to discover him he must have been disappointed, for the

man occupied no office. He had failed to learn his name. It was only

by accident that nearly two months later he met Prance and recognised

him as the man he wanted. As he had no knowledge himself of the murder

and could not profess to have been present at it, he devised the story

that he had been shewn the body as it lay in a room in Somerset House

on the night of October 14. At this point he introduced the name of

Samuel Atkins. Le Fevre and Walsh had in the meantime disappeared, and

Bedloe was left without any fish in his net. Doubtless the fact that

Charles Atkins was his fellow-lodger suggested the idea of implicating

Pepys’ clerk. Samuel Atkins was well known to his namesake and had in

times past given him considerable assistance.[290] Charles Atkins now

shewed his gratitude by arranging with Bedloe to accuse his benefactor

of complicity in Godfrey’s murder.

Prance’s conduct is now easy to explain. He was denounced by a man

who, as he had good reason to know, was not a party to the crime and

could have no certain knowledge of it. If he could shew a bold front

and stoutly maintain his perfect innocence all might be well. But to do

this meant to expose himself to the danger of being hanged. Bedloe had

moreover named other of the real criminals. They might yet be taken and

the secret be dragged from them. This at any cost must be prevented.

So Prance determined to pose as the repentant convert and to shield

the real culprits by bringing to death men whom he knew to be innocent.

His knowledge of the crime enabled him to describe its details in

the most convincing manner, while his acquaintance with the circle

of Somerset House enabled him to fit the wrong persons to the facts.

No doubt, when he was once out of the condemned cell, he felt that

he would prefer to keep free of the business altogether. Perhaps too

he was not without shame and horror at the idea of accusing innocent

men. He recanted. A recantation moreover, if he could persevere in it,

might succeed in shattering Bedloe’s credit as well as his own and

in diverting the line of inquiry from Somerset House. Pressure was

immediately put upon him, he was forced to retract and to return to his

original course of action. In this he was perfectly successful. Not

only was the investigation removed from a quarter unpleasantly near

to the Duke of York, but Prance manipulated his evidence so cleverly

that even the keen inquisitors who sat on the parliamentary committees

never for a moment suspected that the germ of truth for which they were

seeking was not contained in his but in Bedloe’s information. After the

appearance of Prance that was relegated to a secondary position; but

as Bedloe gained the reward of £500 offered for the discovery of the

murder, was lodged in apartments at Whitehall, and received a weekly

pension of ten pounds from the secret service fund, he had no reason

to be dissatisfied with the result. Prance too received a bounty of

fifty pounds “in respect of his services about the plot.”[291] The fact

that the murder was sworn to have taken place in Somerset House was

not without danger to the queen herself. At Bedloe’s first information

she acted a prudent part. She sent a message to the House of Lords

expressing her grief at the thought that such a crime could have taken

place in her residence, and offered to do anything in her power that

might contribute to the discovery of the murderers. When an order was

given to search the palace, she threw open the rooms and in every way

facilitated the process. The course which she adopted was most wise.

The Lords were touched by her confidence and voted thanks for her

message.[292] Her confessor, who had been accused by Bedloe, was not

charged by Prance. In spite of the libels which assailed her she was

never again molested on the matter.[293]

Prance’s attitude as it has here been sketched accorded entirely with

the rest of his evidence. In his examination before the council he

began his story; “On a certain Monday.”[294] When he was taken by

Monmouth and Ossory to Somerset House he said “that it was either at

the latter end or the beginning of the week” that Godfrey had met

his death.[295] The significance of this is clear. No one wishing

to construct a false account of the murder could possibly have made

these statements. It was notorious that Godfrey had disappeared upon

Saturday, October 12. To postpone the date of the murder would be

to add a ludicrous difficulty to the story. This is exactly what

Prance wanted to do. If only he could be branded as a liar and thrust

ignominiously out of the circle of inquiry, his dearest object would

be accomplished. Other statements in his information make it certain

that this was the case. After naming Monday night as the time of

the murder, he went on to say to the council that the body lay in

Somerset House for four days, and was then carried away on the night

of Wednesday. Reckoning at the shortest, the fourth day from Monday

night was Friday, twenty-four hours after Godfrey’s body was found.

Reckoning backwards from Wednesday, the fourth day was Saturday, when

Godfrey was missed. Prance was therefore deliberately falsifying his

evidence in point of time when he named Monday. A similar result is

obtained from his examination by the Duke of Monmouth. In that he

said that the day of the murder was either at the latter end or the

beginning of the week. He further said “that the body lay in Somerset

House about six or seven days before it was carried out.” Counting the

week-end from Friday to Tuesday, six days from either of those or the

intermediate points brings the calculation at least to Thursday. At

the same time Prance declared that the body was removed at midnight on

Wednesday. It is evident that he was trying to throw dust in the eyes

of the investigators. These tactics were in vain, and he was forced to

tell the story in point of time truthfully. As for the fictitious view

of the body on the night of October 14, Prance simply told Bedloe’s

story with as little variation as possible, with the exception that he

did not mention Bedloe at all. Bedloe had landed himself in hopeless

confusion when he was taken to Somerset House to shew the room where it

had taken place.[296] Prance did not attempt to point it out.

Prance did not stop at his evidence on the subject of the murder,

but went on to give information as to the Plot. Unless he had done

so he could hardly have hoped to escape from prison, for it would

seem incredible to the authorities that he should know so much and

yet not know more. Perhaps too he was bitten with the excitement and

glory of an informer’s life. His evidence was not however calculated

to assist materially the party whose interest it was to prosecute

the plot. He had already aroused annoyance by contradicting Bedloe’s

evidence concerning the murder.[297] He now proceeded to spin out a

string of utterly ridiculous stories about the Jesuits and other

Roman Catholics. All that was important in his evidence was hearsay

or directed against men who had already to contend against weightier

accusations. He declared that Fenwick, Ireland, and Grove had told him

that four of the five Popish lords were “to command the army.”[298]

They had for some time past been in prison in the Tower on far more

direct charges. At the trial of Ireland and Grove Prance was not

produced as a witness at all. At the trial of Whitbread, Fenwick, and

Harcourt he made the same statement. Fenwick had told him also that

he need not fear to lose his trade in the case of civil war, for he

should have plenty of work to do in making church ornaments.[299] These

stories were again retailed at the trials of Langhorn and Wakeman.[300]

When he was summoned as a witness against Lord Stafford he could say

no more than that one Singleton, a priest, had told him “that he would

make no more to stab forty parliament men than to eat his dinner.”[301]

Much of his evidence about the Plot was so ludicrous that it could

never be brought into court at all. Four men were to kill the Earl of

Shaftesbury and went continually with pistols in their pockets. One

Bradshaw, an upholsterer, had said openly in a tavern that it was no

more sin to kill a Protestant than to kill a dog, and that “he was

resolved to kill some of the busy lords.” It was the commonest talk

among Roman Catholics that the king and Lord Shaftesbury were to be

murdered. It was equally an ordinary subject of conversation that a

great army was to be raised for the extirpation of heretics. A surgeon,

named Ridley, had often told him “that he hoped to be chirurgeon to

the Catholic army in England”; and when he complimented one Moore, a

servant of the Duke of Norfolk, upon “a very brave horse” which he was

riding, “Moore wished that he had ten thousand of them, and hoped in a

short time that they might have them for the Catholic cause.” In his

publication Prance added to this a disquisition on the immorality of

the secular priests, among whom he had at the time two brothers.[302]

So tangled and nonsensical a tale could be a source of strength to

no prosecution. Dr. Lloyd was alarmed at the extent and facility of

Prance’s new information.[303] Bishop Burnet thought, “It looked very

strange, and added no credit to his other evidence that the papists

should thus be talking of killing the king as if it had been a common

piece of news.[304] And Warner, the Jesuit provincial, characterised

Prance’s later evidence as of little scope and less weight.”[305]

To how many persons Prance’s real position in the tortuous intrigues

which circled round the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey was known is a

question very difficult to answer. By the Jesuit writers on the Plot

his character is treated with a moderation foreign to their attacks on

the other informers. He is to them “a silversmith of no obscurity,”

and “by far less guilty than the rest in the crimes of their past

lives.”[306] It is hard to think that some of them were not acquainted

with the part which he had played. There are stronger indications

that within a select circle his true character was appreciated. When

James II came to the throne Prance was brought to trial for perjury,

and on June 15, 1686 pleaded guilty to the charge. The court treated

him to a lecture in which his conduct was compared favourably to that

of Oates, who had remained hardened to the end, and promised to have

compassion on a true penitent. He was sentenced to pay a fine of a

hundred pounds, to be three times pilloried for the space of an hour,

and to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. The last and heaviest

part of the punishment, the flogging, under which Oates’ iron frame

had nearly sunk, was remitted by the king’s command.[307] There is

considerable reason to believe that the trial was collusive and the

result prearranged. That Prance should confess himself perjured is

easy to understand: to understand why Prance’s sentence was lightened,

unless it was in reward for good service done, would be very difficult.

All the reasons which had worked before for the exculpation of the

Roman Catholics from the guilt of Godfrey’s murder were now redoubled

in force. Oates had already suffered for his crimes. The Popish Plot,

as Sir John Reresby told James, was not only dead, but buried. To

overthrow the Protestant story of Godfrey’s death would be to throw

the last sod upon its grave. This was much; but James was not the man

to forego without reason the sweetest part of his vengeance upon the

witness who had set up that story. The rancour with which he pursued

Oates and Dangerfield seemed to have completely vanished when the turn

came to Prance. Prance had certainly diverted the investigation from

James’ personal neighbourhood; but Oates had been saved nothing of his

terrible punishment by the fact that he had cleared the Duke of York

in his first revelation of the plot. The harm done by Dangerfield to

the Catholic cause was nothing compared to that accomplished by Prance,

if the surface of events told a true tale. Dangerfield was whipped, if

not to death, at least to a point near it. But Prance was let off the

lash. Without the flogging his sentence was trifling. James had no love

for light sentences in themselves. His action is only explicable on the

ground that he was acquainted with the truth, and knew how valuable an

instrument Prance had proved himself.

One man at least could have told him the facts: Father John Warner,

late provincial of the Jesuits in England and confessor of the king.

Less than three years later, when the storm of revolution burst over

the Catholic court and drove its supporters to seek a penurious

refuge on the continent, a shipload of these was setting out from

Gravesend in mid December. They were bound for Dunkirk with as many

valuables as they could carry with them. Before they could set sail,

information was laid and an active man, aided by the officers of the

harbour, boarded the vessel. The last passengers were being rowed out

from shore. They were arrested in the boat and carried back with the

others seized on the ship. They were Father Warner and Miles Prance.

While the officers were busy in caring for the captured property, their

prisoners escaped. Warner made his way to Maidstone and by means of a

forged passport crossed the Channel. Prance was soon after retaken in

the attempt to follow under a false name. The vessel on board which he

was found was seized, but those on her were discharged, and Prance was

probably successful in his third endeavour to reach the continent.[308]

Supposing that Prance had been the Protestant puppet which he has

been believed, this was queer company in which to find him. He had

attacked Warner’s religion, accused his friends, and brought to death

those of his faith by false oaths. His confession of perjury would

hardly weigh down the scale against this. At least he was not the man

whom Warner would choose as a travelling companion on a journey in

which detection might at any moment mean imprisonment and even death.

The risk that Prance would turn coat again and denounce him was not

inconsiderable. Prance’s conduct too was remarkable. Why should he fly

from the Revolution? True, he had confessed that his accusations of

the Catholics were false, and he could not expect great gratitude from

the party in power; but he had only to retract his words once more, on

the plea that his confession had been extorted against his will, to

live in safety, at any rate, if not with prosperity. Away from England,

surrounded by those whom he had wronged, the future before him was

hopeless.

The supposition cannot be supported. Prance’s position in the politics

of the plot is not easy to set in a clear light. The attempt made here

to do so at least offers a hypothesis by which some of the difficulties

are explained. The last phase of the informer’s career, at all events,

becomes intelligible. Prance had been throughout one of the most astute

and audacious of the Jesuit agents, and Warner must have been perfectly

aware of the fact.

The success of Godfrey’s murder as a political move is indubitable.

The Duke of York was the pivot of the Roman Catholic schemes in

England,[309] and Godfrey’s death saved both from utter ruin.

Nevertheless it was attended by gravely adverse consequences. If the

fact of the Jesuit congregation at St. James’ Palace had become known,

nothing could have saved the duke. But the crime which prevented this

gave an impetus to the pursuit of the Plot and a strength to the Whig

party, so great that it all but succeeded in barring him from the

throne and establishing a Protestant dynasty. Godfrey’s fame rose

almost to the height of legend. On a Sunday in the February after his

murder a great darkness overspread the face of the sky of London. The

atmosphere was so murky that in many churches service could not be

continued without the aid of candles. It was said that in the midst of

the gloom in the queen’s chapel at Somerset House, even while mass was

being said, the figure of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey appeared above the

altar. Thereafter the place went by the name of Godfrey Hall.[310]

POLITICS OF THE PLOT

CHAPTER I

THE GOVERNMENT

“The English nation are a sober people,” wrote Charles I to his abler

son, “however at present infatuated.” Charles II had greater right than

ever his father to believe that his subjects were mad. The appearance

of Oates and the death of Godfrey heralded an outburst of feeling as

monstrous as the obscure events which were its cause. From the sense

of proportion they had displayed in the Civil War the English people

seemed now divorced and, while they affected to judge those of “less

happier lands” fickle and tempest-tossed, let the tide of insobriety

mount to the point of complete abandonment. Public opinion was formed

without reason. The accumulated suspicion and hatred of years swelled

into an overpowering volume of tumultuous emotion. Scarcely the most

sane escaped the prevailing contagion of prejudice and terror. None

could tell where the spread would stop.

The times were in a ferment when Parliament met on October 21, 1678.

In his speech from the throne the king gave notice to the Houses that

information had been laid of a Jesuit conspiracy against his life,

and he and the Lord Chancellor following promised a strict inquiry.

The government wished to keep the investigation clear of Westminster,

recognising the danger of parliamentary interference;[311] but the

Commons were of another mind. They returned to their house, and

business was begun by members of the privy council. Motions were made

to take the king’s speech into consideration, for the keep of the

army, and the court party tried first to turn the attention of the

house to the need for money. The question was about to be put, while

country members sat in amazement. Suddenly one rose to his feet and in

a speech of fire brought to debate the subject that was in the mind of

every man present. He admired, he said, that none of those gentlemen

who had spoken nor any others of the house who held great places at

court should speak one word of the Plot, though his Majesty’s life and

government were exposed to manifest danger; the property, liberty,

lives, and, yet dearer, the religion of all were embarked in the same

bottom; that neither an army nor money, in however vast sums, could

protect a prince from the knife of a villain the murder of two Kings

of France testified; and was the prisoner Coleman, so inconsiderable a

person, to be thought the chief agent in a design of such importance,

of such deep intrigues and tortuous ways But a few days before Sir

Edmund Godfrey had been done to death. Were a spaniel lost, inquiry

was made in the _Gazette_: now a worthy gentleman had been barbarously

murdered in discharge of his duty, and no search was undertaken for

the criminals. The privy council, declared the speaker, was cold in

its pursuit; let the great council of the land proceed with greater

vigour.[312] Parliament threw itself into the case with immediate

determination. Committees were appointed to consider ways and means for

the preservation of the king’s person, to inquire into the Plot and

Godfrey’s murder, a bill was prepared to disable papists from sitting

in either house of Parliament, addresses were made for the removal of

all popish recusants from London and for a day of solemn fast, which

was accordingly appointed by proclamation for November 13. Oates and

Bedloe were heard with their expansive tales at the bars of both

houses, and on the 1st of November a joint resolution was voted that

“there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish Plot, contrived

and carried on by Popish Recusants, for the assassinating and murdering

the King and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion.”[313]

Consternation was not expressed in debate alone. Gallant members were

in alarm as well for themselves as for their sovereign. Sir Edward Rich

informed the Lords’ committee of an apprehension he had for some time

felt that both houses of Parliament were to be blown up. A beggar at

the Great Door was arrested on suspicion that he was an Irish earl’s

son. Great knocking had been heard underground in the night hours.

Sir John Cotton, who owned a cellar beneath the Painted Chamber, was

requested to have his coals and faggots removed from so dangerous a

spot, and the Duke of Monmouth generously lent guards to stand watch

until a strict examination could be made. Accompanied by the Masters

of the Ordnance and an expert builder. Sir Christopher Wren and Sir

Jonas Moore conducted the inspection. They reported the lower structure

of the house to be in an extremely dangerous state. The walls were

mostly seven feet thick and contained many secret places. Vaults ran

all the way from the Thames under Westminster Hall. By the help of

neighbours who owned the cellars any one could introduce a store of

gunpowder within four and twenty hours. Without a guard their lordships

could have no security. Orders were given for the adjoining houses and

vaults to be cleared, for the cellars to be opened one into another,

and sentinels to patrol them night and day under command of a trusty

officer. It was even doubted whether Parliament had not better remove

to Northumberland House. Still as neither knocking nor the beggar

were seen to produce ill effects, nothing further was done, and Sir

Edward Rich found himself derided as a lunatic.[314] Beyond Westminster

the terror ran no less high. A report came to town that St. John’s

College, Cambridge, had been burnt down and three priests taken with

fireballs in their possession. The new prison at Clerkenwell was fired

and some priests immured there hailed as the obvious incendiaries.

Somerset House was searched by Lord Ossory, who was promptly said

to have found a hundred thousand fireballs and hand-grenades, A

poor Venetian soapmaker was thrown into prison on the charge of

manufacturing similar infernal machines; but on examination his wares

turned out to be merely balls of scent. Dread of fire seemed to have

touched the limit when Sir William Jones sent an express from Hampstead

with orders to move his store of firewood from the front to the back

cellar of his house in London that it might be less near the malign

hands of Jesuits. And from Flanders came the disquieting rumour that

if, as was expected, the Catholics in England were destroyed in the

turmoil, the burghers of Bruges had prepared the same fate for English

Protestants in their town.[315]

Into the midst of so fierce a storm Charles II and his government were

thus suddenly thrown. It had broken over their heads almost without

warning. September had passed with a clear sky; October was not out

before the elements had massed their forces against the king’s devoted

servants and were threatening to overwhelm the land with a gigantic

catastrophe. In August Charles had at his control a formidable army

and in his pocket the sum of £800,000, with the added satisfaction of

seeing removed by the general peace a fruitful opportunity for his

political opponents: before December the throne on which he sat seemed

tottering to its fall. The servants of the crown faced the situation

with admirable fortitude. English statecraft of the Restoration period

was a haphazard school. Since the fall of Clarendon integrity of

dealing had ceased to be an ideal for English politicians. Common

honesty, the saving grace of party principle, fled from a scene where

could be witnessed the sight of offices bought and sold with cheerful

frankness and votes bidden for as at an auction without shame. The

king’s chief minister lent himself to a policy of which he heartily

disapproved. The king’s mistresses were notable pieces in the game

played at court. A quarrel between them might be expected to influence

the fate of incalculable futures. General want of method reduced the

public services to chaos. The salaries of ambassadors fell into long

arrear; clerks in the offices of the secretaries of state petitioned

vehemently for their wages; the very gentlemen waiters were forced

to urge that either their diet or money in its stead should not be

denied them.[316] Nevertheless the nation throve on a habit of inspired

disorder. Lord Treasurer Danby increased the royal revenue wonderfully.

The Stop of the Exchequer, a breach of faith which convulsed the

city, scarcely sufficed to shock the national credit. The growth of

trade and commerce was completely changing the aspect of England,

and wealth increased rapidly. Able and painstaking men such as Sir

Joseph Williamson, Sir William Temple, Henry Coventry, Sir Leoline

Jenkins, and in a lesser degree Samuel Pepys and the Earl of Conway,

conducted the changeful administration of affairs with industry and

circumspection. Want of order did not disturb them, for they were used

to none; and secretaries of state were accustomed to pursue their royal

master with business in bed, at his after-dinner dose, and even to

still more remote places of retreat.[317] A continual shifting of the

horizon prepared them for unexpected events. Without brilliant parts

they learned to confront steadily situations of difficulty and danger.

That which now met them was not without precedent. It had become

almost a tradition of Charles’ government to expect the worst without

ceasing to hope for the best. From the Restoration onwards alarms had

been frequent and a spirit of revolt, even of revolution, in the air.

Venner’s insurrection and the trouble in Scotland served during the

earlier years to make plain that stability was not assured, and it

was not only events on the surface that denoted uneasiness. In 1673

and the following year attention was occupied by a mysterious affair,

never probed to the bottom, in which Edmund Everard, later perjured

as an informer at the time of the Popish Plot, was charged with a

design to poison the Duke of Monmouth and other persons of quality, and

himself confessed his ill intention, having apparently been tutored

by some of the experts in that art who flourished across the channel;

with the result that he was thrown into the Tower, and was able four

years after to boast of having been the first to discover the Plot and

to charge the authorities with stifling it in his person.[318] Other

problems trod upon the heels of this in quick succession. Throughout

the years 1675 and 1676 the government shewed anxiety lest a fresh

sectarian movement was on foot. A great riot made in the former year

by the London prentices drew watchful eyes upon reputed fanatics.

Considerable information was collected in the provinces, and judges

on circuit earned golden praise by proving their attachment in word

and deed to the established church. At Worcester a man of notorious

opinions stood his trial for treason, but the jury acquitted him on

the ground of madness, and despite plain speaking from the bench held

to their verdict. Dark hints reached the government that on the first

meeting of Parliament after the long prorogation an attempt would be

made to seize the king and his brother and “order all things securely.”

Somewhat later Compton, Bishop of London, furnished the Lord Treasurer

with particulars of conventicles held by Anabaptists and other

dangerous dissenters in the city and in Southwark, amounting to the

number of sixteen, and for the most part frequented by between one and

three hundred persons; while from another source Danby learned that the

total of a few of the London congregations rose to over four thousand

souls.[319]

At the same time other adversaries of the church were not neglected.

Already in the spring of 1676 report was rife of papists laying

in supplies of arms, and a gentleman of Hereford was charged by a

number of witnesses with having declared that, had a recent account

of the king’s sickness or death continued but one day longer, the

Duke of York would have been proclaimed, and rather than allow the

duke to want men he would have raised a troop of horse at his own

expense. Orders were sent to the deputy lieutenant of the county to

keep stricter watch over the Roman Catholics of whom such tales were

told.[320] Repeated proclamations against the bold and open repair to

the chapels of foreign ambassadors for the purpose of hearing mass

and of the maintenance by them of English priests were doubtless

caused by political need, but the same reason cannot account for

private directions given by the king to Secretary Coventry to obtain

information as to the extent and nature of the correspondence carried

on with foreign parts by Edward Coleman. Instructions were issued

for his letters to be intercepted, and some dozen were seized, but

among them, unfortunately for all concerned, none of high importance.

Although no find was made, the fact that search should have been

thought necessary denotes in the government a real sense of the

working underground.[321] Shortly before, Danby had caused the bishops

to make returns of the proportion of Roman Catholics and other

dissenters to conformists in their several dioceses, and that from the

Bishop of Winchester is preserved. Dr. Morley had been advised that the

motive was a fear of the result should the laws against conventicles

be fully executed, as it was suspected that the number of those to be

suppressed exceeded that of the suppressors. He was delighted to reply

that the fear was groundless. Out of nearly 160,000 inhabitants in the

diocese of Winchester 140,000 conformed to the Church of England, and

of the remainder only 968 were classed as popish recusants; while the

bishop’s pious belief that the odds in favour of his side would be

equally great elsewhere was confirmed by an abstract of the returns

for the whole province of Canterbury setting down the complete number

of papists at 11,870. Other accounts gave the number of Catholics in

London alone as 30,000, and their real strength in England remains

unknown; but Danby had to admit to the French ambassador, when he spoke

of the alarm caused by the Duke of York’s conduct, that they did not

muster in all more than twelve thousand.[322] Though he did not lose

sight of Catholic movements and provided himself with detailed accounts

of their less known leaders in London,[323] the Lord Treasurer clearly

entertained keener fears of danger from the other side.

So corrupt and able a statesman as the Earl of Danby could not fail

of being an object of attack when the panic of the Popish Plot swept

over the country. The one party accused him of having contrived the

whole affair to sustain his credit by a persecution of the Catholics

and an increase of the army, the other of stifling it to save the

Duke of York, his former patron.[324] In truth he had done neither

the one nor the other. When Tonge’s information first came to hand he

had regarded it carefully and wished to sift the matter with caution.

As likelihood grew stronger that the doctor was a liar, Danby became

cooler towards him; so cool indeed that Tonge and his associates fell

into a fright for the prosperity of their future and sought help

elsewhere. Yet he realised the necessity for watchfulness, and it was

due to his energy that Coleman’s papers were seized.[325] This attitude

was hardly changed by the meeting of Parliament. The Lord Treasurer was

a consistent opponent of the French and Roman Catholic interest. His

constant endeavour was to draw Charles into union with Parliament and

foreign Protestant powers against the pretensions of Louis XIV, and

he thought that unless the king obtained foreign aid and set himself

to a regular conquest of his country this was the only way to avoid

complete division and debility at home;[326] but though these were

his hopes, he was ready at the very moment of urging them to support

his master’s private policy abroad in a wholly contrary spirit, and

so caused his own fall; for when Charles wrote to Paris for money

from the French king, Danby executed his orders, thus leaving his

handwriting to be produced against him. The fate that forced the Lord

Treasurer to act on instructions he detested was bitter. Nevertheless

he was not prepared to sacrifice office for principle. He continued

to obey orders and to hold his place. Retribution fell on him. The

immoral character of his conduct reaped a full reward; but it must be

remembered that at a time when the king was master of his servants as

well in fact as in name, there was something in Danby’s plea that the

monarch’s command in matters of peace and war and foreign policy was

absolute to his minister, and not open to question. Immoral or not, the

danger of Danby’s course was obvious, for powerful enemies at home and

abroad were eagerly waiting the moment to hurl the forerunners of prime

ministers from his eminent seat.

The opportunity had at last arrived. Feared and hated by the opposition

for his policy of Anglican predominance at home, by the French

government as a chief supporter of Protestant resistance on the

continent, by both for the army which might be used against either,

Danby found himself assailed by a combination of the Whig leaders

and the French ambassador. He had refused the place of secretary of

state to Ralph Montagu, ambassador in Paris, and the latter was now

recalled from his post by Charles owing to a discreditable intrigue

he had formed with the Duchess of Cleveland, abandoned and living in

France. Nor did the disgrace end there, for Montagu’s name was struck

off the list of the privy council. With him he brought back to England

letters written by Danby to demand subsidies from Louis. His intentions

could not yet be foreseen, but the indications of public events were

enough to cause the Treasurer grave anxiety. An atmosphere of plot and

disturbance surrounded the court, and while information poured in,

little exact evidence could be extracted from it. Money either to pay

or to disband the army there was none; the fleet was equally without

provision, and Parliament was tender of voting supplies lest they

should be misused. The Commons had imprisoned Secretary Williamson for

issuing commissions to popish recusants, and were highly incensed when

on the next day Charles calmly released him: worst of all, they were

preparing a bill to raise the militia of the whole kingdom without

possibility of its disbandment for a period of six weeks. Danby

believed that under cover of the universal excitement sinister designs

against the Duke of York and himself were in the air. Many were of

opinion, he wrote to Sir William Temple, that those who called for

inquiry into the Plot had objects nearer their hearts that they were

pursuing under its cover. Yet he was so overwhelmed with business that

he hardly had time to review the situation in his mind and consider the

best course to pursue.[327]

Suddenly the bolt fell as if from the blue. Danby was warned by Sir

John Reresby of danger impending from Montagu’s side. He had in vain

attempted to manage the ambassador’s exclusion from Parliament; Montagu

was defeated at Grinstead by the Treasurer’s candidate, and narrowly

won a seat for Northampton on a contested election. Had he failed he

could scarcely have dared fortune, but privilege of Parliament secured

him from the enmity of the powers. Roused to immediate action, the

minister attempted a counterstroke. Montagu had held unauthorised

communication with the papal nuncio at Paris, and Danby charged him

before the council with his malpractice, swiftly sending a warrant

to seize his papers. But here the adroit statesman met more than

his match. In the midst of the disturbance caused to the Commons by

the king’s message on the subject, Montagu quietly remarked that he

believed the search a design by abstracting evidence to conceal the

misconduct of a great minister of which he had knowledge. He had in

fact removed the documents from his other papers and placed them in

safe keeping; and on the following day they were triumphantly produced

to the House as evidence of Danby’s popery, treachery, and subservience

to the interests of the King of France. For Montagu had been bought

by Barillon and Shaftesbury, and promised Louis XIV for a hundred

thousand crowns to procure the Treasurer’s ruin within six months. At

a moment when all Protestants in the realm were crying in horror at

the danger threatening their religion, the spectacle was exhibited of

the king’s chief minister hurled from power by the French ambassador

in conjunction with the leaders of the Protestant party for his too

powerful support of the Protestant cause and the Anglican constitution.

The man who had reorganised the royal finance, and had persistently

advocated a national policy in the cause of English commerce and

the English crown, vanished from the scene, accused of treachery to

all three and under the stigma of having robbed his master and left

twenty-two shillings and ten pence in an exchequer which, after payment

for a vast addition to the navy, was actually stocked with over a

hundred thousand pounds.[328] Charged with plotting, the Treasurer was

himself the victim of a plot as base and planned by men as unscrupulous

as are known to the annals of English politics. The rest of the story

is thrice-told; how Danby was impeached and defended himself, pardoned

and raised to a marquisate, how he lay hid in Whitehall while the bill

of attainder was being passed, how he saved his head by surrendering

four days before the attaint had force, and passed from the intrigues

of the Popish Plot to an imprisonment of five years in the Tower,

whence he was released in the day of his master’s triumph. Many years

after, when Danby published his letters, he took occasion to prove

himself no less unscrupulous than his enemies by judiciously altering

the words, “I approve of this letter,” which stood in the king’s

writing at the foot of the most incriminating sheet, to those which in

their yet more exonerating form have become famous; “This letter is

writ by my order—C. R.” Meanwhile his opponents triumphed, and Montagu

was even successful in obtaining from the French king as much as half

the reward promised for his perfidy.[329]

The fall of the Lord Treasurer swelled the difficulties of the

government without disconcerting its policy. Though the opposition

could score so great a success, there was no thought of giving up the

main issue. The scheme of the militia bill was struck to the ground,

for Charles declared that he would not comply with it for so much as

the space of half an hour; he had not forgotten that the home forces

might be used against other than foreign enemies. The Whig party was

inspired with rage. Ten days before it had met with a still more

serious rebuff. On November 20 the bill disabling Roman Catholics from

sitting in Parliament was passed by the Lords, but with a proviso

excepting the Duke of York by name from its action. James had won

his point only by tears and incredible exertion, and the opposition

expected confidently to throw the proviso out in the Commons. A furious

debate took place. Supporters of the duke were assailed with cries of

“Coleman’s letters! Coleman’s letters!” High words were bandied across

the floor of the House, and Sir Jonathan Trelawny, on the court side,

was committed to the Tower for boxing the ears of Mr. Ash, a country

member, and calling him a rascal. Yet to the bitter disappointment of

its opponents the government was successful, and the saving clause

passed by a majority of two votes. The French ambassador thought that

James could have hardly escaped from a greater danger.[330] Another

was already looming darkly against him out of the cloudy future. Early

in the session of Parliament Shaftesbury, supported by Halifax, Essex,

and Barlow, now Bishop of London, had demanded the Duke of York’s

dismissal from the king’s presence and counsels. Lord Russell moved an

address to the same effect in the Commons. In the debate which followed

Sacheverell, acting on the report of Coleman’s examination that he had

himself drawn up, gave the first direct hint of the memorable project

of the Exclusion bill. Might not the king and Parliament, he asked,

dispose of the succession to the crown of England?[331] The idea struck

immediate root. It was the obvious point to which all that had gone

before tended. The exclusion of James was to be the touchstone of

English politics for two years, and the lines on which parties were to

be divided by it showed themselves at once. King Charles did not delay

to make his view of the situation plain. He told Danby in private that

he would not object to pare the nails of a popish successor, but that

nothing should induce him to see his brother’s right suffer injury;

and with more dignified language and thanks for the care manifested

for his personal safety informed Parliament of his readiness to join

in all possible ways and means to establish the Protestant religion in

firm security. Subjects might be assured that he would assent to any

bills presented to safeguard them during the reign of his successor,

with this ominous condition only, that none should diminish the just

powers of the throne or tend to impeach the right of succession and the

descent of the crown in the true line.[332] On the other side the Whig

lords, with whom Halifax was still at this time allied, had adopted the

notion and persuaded Barillon that an attack upon the duke was the best

way to attain his end. The ambassador was not wholly convinced but,

since the resistance he could make to their plan would be useless, went

the way of his friends and lent them judicious assistance. At least the

Frenchman’s policy proved successful. His objects were to overthrow

Danby and force Charles to disband the army which might perhaps be

used against France. Danby fell; and on the very day when the warrant

was sent to seize Montagu’s papers, the Commons voted a supply for

the purpose of paying off all the troops raised in the course of the

preceding year. A month later, as a last attempt to save his minister,

Charles dissolved the Cavalier Parliament after an unbroken existence

of eighteen years.

The elections for the new parliament were fought amid intense

excitement and with peculiar energy. Both parties exerted their

utmost powers to gain the day. The contest was the sole subject of

conversation. Purse and pen and all other imaginable means of influence

were employed without stint to elevate the intelligence and debase the

morals of the electors of England. At this time began the ingenious

practice of splitting freeholds to multiply votes. Under the guidance

of Shaftesbury pamphlets urging the Exclusion as the only means of

safety for the nation flooded the country. Lord Russell, one of the

most honest of his party, was elected for two counties. Drunkenness and

bribery were everywhere notorious. At Norwich “a strange consumption of

beer” was noted by Sir Thomas Browne. Sir William Waller, a magistrate

famed for his success in priest-hunting, won a seat at Westminster at

no less a cost, as those on his own side reported, than of a thousand

pounds. At the Bedfordshire polls the same interest carried the day

for six times that sum. Everywhere the Whigs were victorious. When the

result came to be known, it was found that the government could rely

upon a mere handful of twenty or thirty votes in the new parliament as

against a hundred and fifty in the old.[333]

Notwithstanding the disastrous complexion of affairs Charles began

the session on March 6, 1679 with considerable success. Outside the

circle of politicians the chief cause of alarm to the nation was the

continued existence of the army. The king had decided to remove the

ground of fear by undertaking the actual disbandment of his troops. To

this end he demanded from the Commons the accomplishment of the offer

made by the last parliament. On April 16 a supply of over £206,000 was

voted and appropriated for the purpose, and the disbandment began at

once.[334] Before many months had passed a source of apparent strength

and real weakness to the government was thus removed. Accusations of

arbitrary rule lost much of their force; for those who now indulged in

the charge were not only open to the retort, which could be levelled at

them before, that their insistance was insincere, but found themselves

in a far less good position to reply. It was perhaps with more personal

pleasure that Charles defeated the Commons in an altercation that took

place at the opening of Parliament over their choice of a Speaker,

Edward Seymour, a wealthy and profligate Devonshire landowner, who had

served in the chair in the late House of Commons, was noted for an able

opponent of the court and in particular of Lord Danby. The government

determined to effect a change, and named for Speaker Sir Thomas Meres,

a member of the Whig party, as less likely to give offence than one

from the court side. The Commons however elected Seymour again, and he,

having wind of the king’s intention to grant the formal request made

by all Speakers to be relieved of their dignity, on his presentation

omitted the customary words; but the Lord Chancellor replied for

Charles that he could not allow such talent to be wasted on the post,

having other employment for him, and sent Seymour and the rest of the

Commons back to choose another. High was the indignation of the House,

which sat for a whole week headless, combative, and remonstrating.

One ardent member declared: “This is gagging the Commons of England

and, like an Italian revenge, damning the soul first, then killing

the body.” A representation was made to the king, protesting that his

action was without precedent and the Commons only within their rights,

and a second to justify the first, which Charles had told them was

mere waste of time. In answer the king prorogued Parliament for two

days. When it again assembled, the matter was allowed to drop. Neither

Seymour nor Meres was proposed, but Serjeant Gregory, of a more neutral

disposition, who was elected and approved without difficulty.[335]

Though the Commons professed to be satisfied, since they had

established their right to a free choice, the honours lay in reality

with Charles, who had successfully rejected a freely chosen candidate

objectionable to himself.

The beginning of the parliament was prophetic of what was to come. At

the time no cause could seem lower than that of the court. The Whigs

had swept the country at the elections. Everything at Whitehall, at

the exchequer, in the services, was in disorder and disrepair. The

royal household still clamoured for unpaid wages. The whole nation

was in a ferment. Men’s minds were painfully divided by the project

of exclusion. Innumerable cabals, intriguing one against another,

troubled the surface of politics and clouded the depths. No one could

tell what designs and what dangers any moment might bring forth. Above

all no one could gauge the king’s intentions. Uncertainty reigned

everywhere, and it seemed as if the opposing forces had but to make

one push and thrust aside the resistance of government, order England

as they would, and reign in peace.[336] A somewhat different light

is shed by after events on “the very melancholy aspect” which Sir

John Reresby noted in the kingdom. In spite of the clamour raised on

all sides against feebleness and irresolution, the government had

marshalled its strength with some adroitness. Danby was in the Tower.

The army was in the act of being disbanded. The treasury was put

into commission, and the Earl of Essex, whose austerity and popular

sympathies could not but inspire some measure of confidence, named as

first commissioner. Before Parliament assembled the Duke of York at

his brother’s command had left the kingdom, and was watching events

with wrath and foreboding, but with little influence, from across

the Channel. Nothing that could betoken a conciliatory spirit in the

court had been omitted. There followed a move still more important as

a check to the unbridled Commons. The committee of secrecy had just

been instructed to consider methods of impeachment of the five Popish

lords, when on April 21 the king announced to Parliament that he had

chosen a new privy council. The scheme he went on to outline, though

attributed at the time to divers other heads, had its origin in the

elegant fancy of Sir William Temple.[337] That excellent ambassador and

gardener, returning from a mission to the Hague, found the turbulence

of the state and the dangers surrounding the king such that he promptly

set to considering how he might devise some advantage to his master’s

service. Diplomatic experience and a natural bent to theoretical

statesmanship were more prominent in his mind than knowledge of the

practical expedients which must temper the keenness of political

ideas in action. He saw Parliament daily encroaching, as it seemed to

him, on the royal prerogative; he saw the king drawing apart from his

people; he feared an open rupture which might throw the state into

convulsion. On these considerations he evolved the notion of a third

authority, which, standing midway between the two, should act at the

same time as a cushion and as a link. The instrument he found in the

privy council. By reducing the number from fifty to thirty Temple hoped

that business would be discussed by the whole board, cabals and secret

understandings avoided. Members were no longer to be of one party

only, or allied in ambition; on the contrary, fifteen places should

go to officers of state, fifteen to popular leaders from both houses

of Parliament; and since he observed authority to follow land, Temple

arranged that the total income of the several members should amount

to £300,000, a sum to be compared not unfavourably with that of the

House of Commons, which was estimated at a third as much again. By such

a council the king’s policy would be ably regulated. Its composition

would give confidence even to the most hostile parliament. Neither by

Parliament nor by king could its authority be lightly disregarded.

In the event of a breach between the two the council would be rich

enough to assist the finances of the state. At the same time the king

could be certain, by means of the votes of his fifteen officers, that

he would not be forced to act against his own interests. The project

won instant approval. Essex considered that it pointed a return to

the happy days of the Restoration; Lord Sunderland, now secretary of

state in place of Sir Joseph Williamson, was favourably impressed;

the Lord Chancellor declared it was as a thing from heaven fallen

into his majesty’s breast. The Chancellor’s remark had an unwitting

point. Though the scheme was of Temple’s conception, Charles made it

his own by a characteristic touch. He consented to the inclusion of

Halifax in the new council only after some pressure, for he disliked

and perhaps feared the great Trimmer. It was therefore with amazement

that his advisers heard the king name Lord Shaftesbury. Still more

amazing, Charles positively insisted on the earl’s inclusion as an

extraordinary member of the council and its president. Temple was

compelled to submit, not without protest. It was an act which should

have given pause to optimists. None the less the news of the scheme

was hailed with general applause. Bonfires were lighted in the city,

the East India Company’s stock rose rapidly, Barillon did not conceal

his mortification, and the Dutch republic marked the occasion by the

appointment of one of its most able ministers as ambassador to St.

James’; only the House of Commons viewed the matter in an unexpected

light and with dissatisfaction. While the French feared a bond of union

between the hostile parties in England and old Cavaliers that the king

had delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, the Whigs held

sullenly aloof from rejoicing, or proclaimed that they were being led

into a trap. The Earl of Essex had already lost credit with his friends

by serving on the commission for the treasury, and those of the party

who took places on the council found that glances were cast askance at

them as betrayers of their trust.[338]

To most eyes the situation as affected by the change of council was

far from clear. The king himself held the key to it. Whether or no

Temple’s scheme was really practicable, Charles did not intend to try.

He had gained a point by dissolving his old council, which was filled

with friends of Danby.[339] Another and a greater advantage was that

signified by the choice of Shaftesbury as president of the new. His

friends thought the king guilty of a lamentable piece of feebleness.

Had the council been meant to consult it would perhaps have been so.

But this was far from Charles’ design. “God’s fish!” he said to

an intimate, “they have put a set of men about me, but they shall

know nothing, and this keep to yourself.” Evidently the diplomatic

constitution had no grand future before it. And so it proved. Within

a short time the author was actively disregarding his own principle

by forming one of a cabinet of four with Sunderland, Essex, and

Halifax, to arrange matters before they came before the council and

Parliament; while Charles, as good as his word, kept his own counsel

and acted without the advice either of them or of the board at large,

on one notable occasion against its will and to the great displeasure

of the popular members. In Parliament the Whig councillors continued

their opposition as fiercely as ever, but at the council board they

had little influence. The position rapidly became impossible. It can

hardly be doubted that this was Charles’ exact intention. He had

achieved a double success. He had seemed to give the Whig leaders a

chance of reforming the government, while in fact he had only driven

them to greater exasperation. In the eyes of the nation he had offered

a compromise, secure in the knowledge that it would not be accepted.

The trick which the Commons feared had been played to a nicety. For

this their chiefs had only to thank themselves. Had they acted on their

suspicion and refused places on the council, their conduct would in

this have been faultless. But the bait was too tempting to be rejected.

They accepted the offer of office, intending from this new post of

vantage to pursue their old plans. Their duplicity gained nothing.

The king had provided for the result, and their failure could only

seem due to the deceit and intolerance with which they had repulsed

his good intentions. On October 15, 1679 Shaftesbury was dismissed

from the council in consequence of his agitation against the Duke of

York, and three months later Russell, Cavendish, Capel, and Powle, his

four most prominent allies on the board, tendered their resignation

by his advice. Charles accepted it in the words, “With all my heart.”

The famous scheme was thus finally abandoned. Temple withdrew from

politics to his garden and his library. Essex quitted the treasury and

openly joined the opposition. Only Halifax, after retirement to the

country, remained in the king’s service.[340]

Meanwhile the tide in Parliament ran high against the government. The

new constitution had hardly begun its career before the Commons on

April 27 settled to consider how they might best preserve his Majesty’s

person from the attacks of papists. Impotent attempts made by members

in the court interest to divert the debate only increased its keenness,

and the House passed from stage to stage of fiery enthusiasm until

on Mr. Hampden’s motion it was unanimously declared that “the Duke

of York being a papist and the hopes of his coming such to the crown

have given the greatest countenance and encouragement to the present

conspiracies and designs of papists against the king and the Protestant

religion.” With the addition that James had been the unwilling cause

of the Plot, the House of Lords adopted the motion as it stood. This

was the prelude to the piece to come. On Sunday, May 11, when daylight

had gone out with talk, a resolution was carried, those against it

refusing to have their votes taken, “that a bill be brought in to

disable the Duke of York to inherit the Imperial Crown of this realm.”

It was followed by the ferocious declaration of the Commons that they

would stand by his Majesty with their lives and fortunes and, should

he come to any violent death (which God forbid!), revenge it to the

utmost upon the Roman Catholics. Four days later the Exclusion bill

was introduced and read for the first time. On May 21 it passed the

second reading and was committed. The threatening aspect of these

events could not be mistaken. The Commons were fierce and pertinacious.

Danby’s discomfiture was followed by an attack on Lauderdale and by

another, still more violent, on the system of secret service money.

“Extraordinary heats” broke out on the question whether bishops had

or having should retain their right to sit in judgment upon peers

arraigned on a capital charge, for the trial of the five Popish lords

was expected, and the strength of the spiritual peers was a matter of

grave consideration to those who hoped for an adverse verdict. Many

were the indecencies, records Burnet, that arose on this occasion both

in town and in country. Shaftesbury was expecting an easy triumph.

Suddenly all came to an end. The king had information that the common

council of the city was about to offer public assistance to the Commons

in their efforts for the preservation of the Protestant faith, and that

an inflammatory remonstrance on the subject of the Plot lay ready for

presentation in the House. His mind was made up. With the cheerfulness

characteristic of him he seemed to be thinking of nothing, when on May

26 he summoned the Commons to his presence and without warning declared

a prorogation of three months. Eight weeks later Charles dissolved

the Little Parliament of Westminster against the advice of almost the

whole of his council. The blow fell with crushing effect upon the Whig

party. Shaftesbury swore openly that he would have the heads of those

who had counselled it.[341] Yet this uproarious session produced one

good thing. Before proroguing Parliament the king gave his assent to

the Habeas Corpus Act, its solitary record on the statute book. How

near that sheet was to being blank may be told by the fact that this

measure, of weighty importance in the history of England, only passed

its third reading in the House of Lords because the Whig teller in joke

counted one very fat lord as ten.[342]

Neither Parliament nor the privy council as a whole can properly be

said at this time to have been the government of the country. Under

the old system the council was a large and chiefly honorary body, the

business of which was regularly transacted by a few of its members.

By Sir William Temple’s construction it became a miniature of the

House of Commons as in the days when the government could count upon

about half the votes with an occasional majority. Though those who

carried on affairs might be privy councillors, there were also many

councillors who made it their chief business to prevent them from

doing so. The parliament of 1679 was still less to be classed with the

government than its predecessor. Here the Commons hardly disguised an

overmastering wish to obstruct the administration by others until it

fell wholly into their own hands, and to force on the government a

policy framed in the country and strongly disapproved at court. The

humour of the Commons seemed to infect the Lords also. The alarm and

activity of the upper house throughout the panic of the Plot almost

equalled those of the Commons; and it was by great exertion alone that

the court could carry the day even when the gravest interests were at

stake. The English state presented at the moment a striking appearance.

Since the beginning of the modern world government in England has been

with scant exception by consent, not only in the sense that in every

case force is ultimately on the side of the governed, but by virtue of

the fact that the English government has had nothing on which to rely

but the consent of the nation. Two famous examples had already shown

how hard of execution other methods must be. Mutual agreement between

parts of the frame was necessary to its usefulness. But now it seemed

as if this was no more. Variance had sprung up and silently grown until

it became direct opposition. Government and governed were divided

by an openly contrary spirit. It was a question how far Charles’

government could allow the division to widen without being engulfed

in it. On the one side were ranged the forcible and callous statesmen

who had organised the country party in the old Cavalier Parliament

and transformed its soul to Whiggism; the country gentlemen, formerly

staunchest adherents of the government, the class from whom now its

keen opponents were drawn; religious dissenters; high-principled

republicans; malcontents of every kind; the squirearchy, the

magistracy, the Church of England.[343] On the other there met this

formidable array a mere handful of men, dependents of the court or

trained officials zealous to perform their duty and to uphold the

traditions of English politics. The government was formed of the king

and his servants, chief among them the secretaries of state. Apart from

these support for the king’s policy was meagre indeed.

The work which fell on the secretaries’ shoulders was immense.

Throughout the winter which followed Oates’ revelations a perpetual

stream of reports, warnings, informations poured into their offices.

From all quarters came disturbing news. Alarms of armed men exercising

in bands at night were constant. Spanish forces were said to have

landed in Ireland and the French in Scotland. Tynemouth Castle was

reported blown up by gunpowder. Five thousand Spaniards were in

Wales. A combined French and Spanish fleet was only prevented by a

storm from landing at Milford Haven. The king’s ships at Chatham and

elsewhere were to be burnt and thus facilitate the passage of troops

from Dunkirk, while Hull and other seaports were ready to receive the

invaders. Gentlemen rode up from Yorkshire with wild tales of “the

crack and noise” in those parts, and in the West Riding the militia

was called out against imaginary foes. Vast fears came from Cheshire

of strange persons and a private post, denoting no good intentions.

An English doctor wrote from Amsterdam telling how he had overheard

conspirators planning the king’s destruction for the month of April,

and had barely escaped being murdered for his indiscretion.[344]

All this and a vast mass of the same description demanded instant

attention, decision, and answer. Frivolous accusations against reputed

papists and plotters were innumerable. A well-wisher sent from Vienna

as a present to the king an antidote of astonishing excellence against

possible poisons. A still more ingenious correspondent forwarded a

scheme to turn the tables on the pope by “assaulting the city of

Rome on that side where the Vatican palace stands and bringing away

the library.”[345] In Ireland, where the Duke of Ormonde’s sober

government preserved admirable order, long reports were drawn up

for the instruction of the secretaries at Whitehall, and these too

had to be perused.[346] London alone, apart from the turmoil caused

by Godfrey’s death, provided heavy work. Order had to be taken for

safeguarding the palace; twenty doors leading into St. James’ Park

were blocked and a sewer grated. Protestants and Catholics posted

mutual accusations to Whitehall until the secretaries were at their

wits’ end how to deal with them. On the prorogation of Parliament in

May, bills were distributed urging the prentices to take arms and

demand the trial of the lords in the Tower. The guards at the palace

were doubled, strong watches posted, and every precaution taken. A few

weeks before it had been thought necessary to send two companies of

dragoons to Portsmouth,[347] The whole country seemed on the verge of

insurrection. In December Charles thought he saw signs of a rebellion

brewing. A few months later Danby drew up a memorandum in the Tower

which clearly shewed that he was of the same opinion. He suggested

that the king should take up his residence out of London and call

Parliament to meet him away from the capital, the stronghold of his

opponents’ power. Touch should be kept with the troops disbanded. All

who had served against the king in the Civil War could be forced to

register their names. The navy might be officered by men who would have

influence on the sailors. Lastly and most significant, the Tower should

be secured.[348]

Such and so multifarious were the doings of members of the government.

Yet they were members only. The head was the king’s, the policy his,

and to him its ultimate failure or success must be ascribed.

CHAPTER II

THE CATHOLICS

Of the five hundred Cavalier gentlemen who fell in the Civil War more

than one-third were Catholics,[349] The remnant of the class that

had once been the most dignified and the wealthiest in England was

thrown by the Popish Plot into the fiercest persecution known to its

history. For the first time a real attempt was made to put the penal

laws into full force. All over the country the prisons were filled,

houses of Roman Catholics searched for arms, their estates confiscated.

Fourteen men were executed for high treason in the Plot, three for

Godfrey’s murder. Eight Catholic priests suffered on account of their

orders under the statute of Queen Elizabeth which made it treason for

a subject to take orders from the Church of Rome and, returning to

England, to remain there upwards of forty days. Five died in prison.

Thirty more were condemned to death, but were reprieved, and of these

sixteen died in confinement.[350] The actual figures are enough, but

they do not complete the tale of suffering. Nothing is told by them

of the persecution less than to death, the harrying of men and women

for conscience’ sake, the cruel blight fallen on the lives of hundreds

because of the crimes and follies of intriguers who turned religion to

be an affair of politics. The odour of mystery and the fear of foreign

assault which Catholic designs had for years aggravated had worked in

the minds of Englishmen with so strong a ferment that, were there

much or little of truth in the Plot, it needed only an opportunity for

hardly concealed terror and hatred finally to burst restraint.[351]

On all sides the lot of Catholics was pitiable. Those in London who

were not imprisoned were banished from the capital. As many as thirty

thousand were said to have fled. In the country fresh persecution

awaited them. Justices of the peace had orders to execute strictly the

laws against recusants, the Lord Chancellor to weed the commission

of those who did not. Popish books and relics were diligently sought

out, seized, and burnt. The library, papers, and vestments of Father

Harcourt, rector of the Jesuit College in London, went to make a

public bonfire. Wild House, the residence of the Weld family near

the Strand, and a noted resort of Roman Catholics, was ransacked and

twenty-seven chests of goods haled from a grotto in the garden. Houses

of eminent Catholics all over the kingdom were searched and searched

again, and sometimes almost destroyed by the efforts of officers to

find hidden priests. Catholic merchants found themselves bankrupt.

Everywhere Catholics were driven from home and livelihood, reduced to

beggary. Only the Penderels, Huddlestone the priest, and others who

had helped the king in his flight from Worcester escaped the general

fate. Charles’ gratitude procured for them exemption from the action

of the laws.[352] For the rest only good fortune could mitigate the

horrors of that time. Those in prison had nothing on which to subsist

but the charity of friends. Seized at inns, in secret retreats, on

beds of sickness, they were hurried through rain or snow to dreadful

cells without money or a sufficient supply of clothes. The Duke and

Duchess of York, Lord Castlemaine, and other noble Catholics made

great efforts for their fellows in religion. Yet to relieve the vast

mass of suffering no private aid could suffice. Many were reduced to

the greatest distress. Some even died of want. Priests, hunted from

one to another more painful hiding-place, were put to every shift to

evade capture. For days they lay, cramped and hungry, in holes within

walls, behind chimneys, even fastened up beneath tables, while their

pursuers tore up the floors, broke down the walls, dug up the garden

walks within a few yards of them. When they ventured forth to escape,

it was in the depth of winter, through ice and mud, and in the teeth

of midnight storms. Nor were the pious alone objects of attack. The

most irreligious of their religion were not spared. Long-stored enmity

and an insatiable desire for novelty caught at victims of whatever

character. The Duchesse Mazarin, who lived only for play and her light

loves, was accused of being a party to the Plot. Where the end would

come no man could say. All the Catholics in the service of the royal

family who could took ship for the continent. The Duchess of York wrote

to her brother that she could not describe the hundredth part of the

trouble into which they were plunged. Many abjured their faith or at

least took the condemned oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Pilate and

Herod, wrote the Jesuit Warner to his general, were banded with the

heretic priests against his society and the Catholics. A few weeks

later he added: “Hope itself is scarce left us.”[353]

In no part of the country was persecution more bitter than in

Yorkshire. Even before the time of the Popish Plot Catholics in the

country had been subjected to considerable annoyance, and when “the

great crack and noise” of the event burst on the astonished ears

of the world they became at once the object of vehement attack.

Inquisition was made in all parts for priests and recusants. The

cells of York Castle, of which the condition was notorious in an age

of notorious prisons, were filled. To priests and their relatives

particular attention was paid. Soon two scoundrels, by name Mowbray

and Bolron, came forward to give evidence of the preparations of

papists to aid in the grand design discovered by Oates. Bolron had

been manager of coal-pits on the estate of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, an

aged baronet and representative of the ancient family of Barnbow Hall

in the West Riding, and, being suspected of fraud, was threatened with

a prosecution for felony by Lady Tempest, the baronet’s daughter.

Mowbray was a servant in the same family discharged on suspicion of

theft. Thus the two had every reason to plot revenge. Bolron swore that

Sir Thomas, together with his daughter, Sir Miles Stapleton, several

other gentlemen, and his nephew, a priest named Thwing, had signed

a resolution to kill the king and had offered a thousand pounds to

whoever should do the deed. Mowbray added that they had intended to

burn London and York to the ground. The Yorkshire magistrates refused

to act on the information of known criminals, but Bolron went to town

and found in Shaftesbury an inquisitor who would not consent to see the

matter dropped.[354] Sir Thomas was tried at Westminster, but acquitted

by a jury of Yorkshire gentlemen. Sir Miles Stapleton and Lady Tempest

stood their trial at York. They also were acquitted, but upon the

same discreditable evidence Thwing was convicted and on October 23,

1680 suffered the penalty for high treason. In spite of the fact that

three juries had disbelieved his word Bolron was able by permission of

the House of Commons to produce an ingenious forgery, entitled “The

Papists’ Bloody Oath of Secrecy and Litany of Intercession,” which

after repeated exposure and the lapse of more than two centuries is

still sometimes taken for true by his more gullible, if less malignant,

successors. For the moment the acquittal of Gascoigne and his friends

stayed the flow of blood, but the Yorkshire Protestants shewed

effectively by their conduct at the Revolution that their feelings

remained unchanged.[355]

While persecution fell indiscriminately on those who confessed the

creed of the Roman Church, it was not to be expected that all should

view their troubles alike. The lead given in the speech from the throne

was freely followed. It was a Jesuit plot, said the king. It was a

Jesuit plot, cried Catholics who were not under the influence of the

order. The society has seldom drawn the affection of many outside its

own ranks in any age, and in the seventeenth century incurred the

hatred of almost all parts of the English Catholic body. Constant

intrigues set the secular priests, members of the other orders, and, it

can hardly be doubted, a large number of laymen against its restless

and selfish policy. The result was plain. For the doings of the society

every one had now to suffer. In the midst of fierce trouble it was

not against the government but against the Jesuits that Catholic

resentment was shewn. Jesuits were everywhere scouted, railed at for

their pernicious principles, scarce treated civilly in the company they

sought. There was even rejoicing at their downfall. At last old scores

would be paid off; at last all the juggles and intrigues at court would

find their due reward in public shame. The Jesuit historian sighs

with meek grief at the additional burden the society was compelled to

bear.[356] It was perhaps not only political intrigues that roused

the displeasure of laymen. Though many of the priesthood were men of

saintly temper and bore affliction with constancy and admirable effort

on behalf of their brethren, there were also black sheep among them.

Scandal caused by priests who thronged the court was of long standing.

In the opinion of the more discreet their behaviour was such as to

cause harm rather than good to the Catholic religion in England.[357]

The case of St. Germain was notorious. Great disrepute was brought on

the Society of Jesus by the story of Godfrey’s murder: had the real

facts been known they would have been more damaging still. Yet more

unfortunate, since it brought laughter with it, was the case of Father

John Gavan, the famous martyr and Jesuit who was likened to “an angel

of God” and his voice in preaching to “a silver trumpet”; for, having

done battle in youth with the lust of the flesh, he was seized at the

height of his reputation in the stables of the Imperial ambassador,

where he was hiding with a woman who passed as his wife and their

son.[358]

It was the distressing fate of so prized a member of the society to be

a cause of dissension and scandal. Even his death at Tyburn did not

make an end. The no less famous Dr. John Sergeant, who had passed a

long career in controversy against Jesuit and Protestant divines, came

forward to blacken Gavan’s memory. Sergeant had already given trouble

to the Roman officials by his teaching on the oath of allegiance.[359]

With the prosecution of the Popish Plot the movement in favour of the

oath naturally grew in strength among moderate Catholics; the formula

had been many times condemned at Rome; and it was heard with dismay at

the curia that the Duke of Norfolk had flouted authority and taken the

oath, presumably to obtain more easily a pass to go beyond seas.[360]

With others of his order Gavan had written against the oath and, though

he pronounced in his speech from the gallows against the notion that

kings might be killed at the pope’s command, would not surrender the

theory of the deposing power.[361] Soon after his execution Sergeant

came to Henry Sidney, ambassador at the Hague. He knew nothing of the

Plot, but offered to prove that according to the teaching of a certain

Jesuit the queen might lawfully kill the king for his unfaithfulness.

Sidney brought the priest to London, where on October 31, 1679 he was

examined by the king in council. A few months later the council again

received his information and that of another priest, David Morris,

who had been educated at St. Omers and the English Jesuit College in

Rome. The Jesuit of whom they spoke was Gavan. It seemed that he had

expressed the opinion complained of to a lady living in Brussels.

By order of the House of Commons the depositions were printed and

obtained a wide circulation. The spectacle of two priests informing

against a brother in orders was calculated to afford grave scandal to

Catholics and equal satisfaction to Protestants. Considerable pains

were taken by the Jesuits to upset the credit of the story, and the

rector of the college at Liège wrote an account containing a denial

of the fact by the lady in question; but the compiler of the _Annual

Letters_ for the year 1680 was unfortunate in choosing to cast doubt

upon her credibility, thus leaving the matter as much open to question

as before.[362] The division in the Catholic body of which this was a

symptom was a source of undoubted weakness: all the efforts to crush

those in favour of the oath were unavailing, and lively agitation

was caused by the certain news that the Duke of York himself had

pledged his allegiance by it, seduced thereto by the example of so

many born Catholics who upheld its lawfulness.[363] However much it

might be denied in public controversy, the refusal to allow the oath

to Catholics was indissolubly bound up with the claim to the papal

power of deposition. About the same time a priest whose name is given

as Forstal maintained that the king might be deposed at the command

or at least with the participation of the pope. James questioned the

nuncio at Brussels on the subject, and received answer that the error

lay not in the opinion held, but in the choice of so inopportune a

moment to express it, since the worst consequences might be expected.

No doubt the matter was in debate, but the meaning to be drawn from

the prelate’s reply was obvious, for he did not think it worth while to

argue the point further. The priest guilty of such rashness was induced

to withdraw for a time to a monastery in Westphalia. Prudence was above

all things necessary in the cause of the church.[364]

The Catholic body was thus divided within itself when the odium into

which it had fallen was enhanced by the obscure intrigue known as

the Meal Tub Plot. It was a time when Catholics could afford to take

few risks in their conduct. Besides direct charges against them they

lay under the imputation of more than one attempt to confound their

accusers by means as base as those used against themselves; two

brothers of Prance, who was not distinguished by the world from other

informers, were secular priests; Jennison, a follower in the train

of Oates, had a brother in the Society of Jesus, who lay dying in

Newgate, and was thought to be a wealthy country gentleman appearing

for honesty’s sake to enlighten his fellow-countrymen; strong suspicion

attached to witnesses who came to speak for the Jesuits at their

trials.[365] It might therefore be expected that the more Catholics

loved their religion, the more carefully would they refrain from adding

to the frightful hostility already shewn against it. Nevertheless it

was at this moment that some of their leaders, not without influence or

repute, undertook to retaliate on their enemies by weapons of more than

questionable worth. Whether they were the first movers in the affair or

entered it on the invitation of others was the question.

In March 1679 a young man of infamous character who went by the name

sometimes of Willoughby, sometimes of Dangerfieid, lay in the debtor’s

side of Newgate. Having been in gaol for the best part of a year, he

began to turn his thoughts to means of getting out, and proceeded

to draw articles of complaint against Captain Richardson, the keeper

of Newgate, for his treatment of prisoners. This came to the ears of

another gaol-bird, Mrs. White, who, fancying Dangerfield’s ability,

on her discharge imparted the fact to a friend on the look-out for

an assistant of talent. Her friend was Mrs. Cellier, whose name and

character have become notorious in a swarm of pamphlets and reports of

trials of the time. She was the wife of a French merchant and pursued

the profession of midwife, and assuredly of something else, within a

circle of Roman Catholic notables. She was employed to collect alms

for the relief of those of her religion in prison for the Plot. She

had been concerned in the unsavoury case of Knox and Lane, who were

put up to defame Oates’ character.[366] When witnesses were sent over

from St. Omers to give evidence at the trials, it was at her house

that they were lodged and fed by Lord Castlemaine. The Duchess of York

had used her services to no small extent. She was in fact a regular

agent of the Catholic nobles in political intrigue, and in close

connection with the Countess of Powis, whose husband, together with

the Lords Petre, Arundel, Stafford, and Bellasis, was in the Tower

on a charge of high treason, a woman of bold and active spirit and

devoted to the Duke of York. The conduct of Mrs. Cellier was not such

as to inspire confidence in the purity of her intentions. Armed with

Mrs. White’s information she repaired to one Gadbury, an astrologer,

for Dangerfield’s horoscope, pretending that she wished for a man to

collect her husband’s debts. To suppose that any sane person could use

one of Dangerfield’s stamp for the purpose would be absurd: it was

certainly for other purposes that he was wanted. Their character soon

became apparent. For there was in Newgate a prisoner named Stroud,

a friend of Bedloe and thought capable of proving that the Earl of

Shaftesbury was suborning witnesses against the lords in the Tower.

Dangerfield was employed to make him drunk and learn what he could.

So well did he perform his task that Mrs. Cellier paid his debts,

whether to the amount of five pounds, as she, or of seven hundred, as

he said, and obtained his release. He was a handsome fellow enough, and

found favour in her eyes. It was now the month of June. Dangerfield was

maintained by his friend, and earned his wages by doing the work of

messenger for the witnesses sent from beyond seas for the defence of

the Five Jesuits, who stood their trial at this time.[367]

Clad in a decent suit, with money in his pocket, and the friend of Mrs.

Cellier’s bosom, Dangerfield began to go about the town. He was taken

to Powis House and introduced to the Countess. He took notes at the

trials of Wakeman and Langhorn and carried them to Lord Powis in the

Tower. Indeed his appearance was so pleasing and his recommendation

so high that he was allowed to take up his abode at Powis House, and

even to sit with Lady Powis at table.[368] And now the serious business

began. One Nevil, alias Payne, a writer of libellous pamphlets, was

retained by Mrs. Cellier with others of his trade for the service

of Lady Powis. Dangerfield’s talents were added to the band, which

carried on a lively production of ballads and pamphlets, such as “The

Transforming of Traitors into Martyrs,” “The Presbyterian Unmasked,”

“The Ballad of the Popish Plot,” “The Danby Reflections,” and an

edition of the Five Jesuits’ dying speeches, all launched against

the Presbyterians. Dangerfield was an attorney’s son and, having

been bred a clerk, could write with some smartness. At the same time

he was employed to go the round of coffee-houses frequented by old

Presbyterians and new Whigs, to pick up what scraps of information

against them he could.[369] The result was most satisfactory. Lists of

names were obtained from the drawers. By means of Gadbury, Dangerfield

was introduced to Sir Robert Peyton, the great Whig merchant whose

apostasy was the first blow to the Whig cause. He thought of joining

the King’s Head Club himself, but was dissuaded on learning that he

would be required to pay a subscription of one or two guineas. He

began to find out the habits of Shaftesbury’s partisans. Presently

there appeared between Dangerfield and Mrs. Cellier those papers, the

authorship of which each fastened upon the other, bearing witness to

the existence of a Presbyterian plot. According to Mrs. Cellier’s

account Dangerfield brought the notes to her; they were written at the

dictation of Lady Powis, was what he said. That point may be discussed

later. It is at any rate certain that Lady Powis was acquainted with

their contents and ready to act upon them. She took Dangerfield to her

son-in-law, the Earl of Peterborough, Lord Peterborough to the Duke of

York, the Duke of York to the king, and the papers, which contained an

account of an extensive movement planned by Shaftesbury and Monmouth,

were seen by all. The budget was headed “The State of the Three

Kingdoms.” The names of the leaders were noted down, commissions were

stated to have already been granted, and a scheme for a revolutionary

government was sketched. James gave the captain, as Dangerfield was

styled by himself and Lord Peterborough, twenty guineas in reward for

his zeal; the king added forty more and turned him over to Secretary

Coventry. As earnest of his good faith, Dangerfield produced two

letters addressed to Shaftesbury by Sir Richard Bulstrode, the minister

at Brussels. They were on indifferent subjects; but how came they in

Dangerfield’s possession? Coventry was dissatisfied with the affair,

and told the captain that if he were to be believed, something more

material must be forthcoming. Dangerfield pressed for a general warrant

to search, but on the advice of Chief-Justice North was refused.

Evidently other means must be tried.[370]

On October 22 Dangerfield, having given notice of a parcel of Flanders

lace smuggled into the country by one Colonel Mansell, obtained a

warrant to search his lodgings, which were in the same house as his

own. That is to say, Dangerfield had specially engaged rooms under

Mansell’s roof. The colonel was named in his list as quartermaster

of the prospective Presbyterian army. Under Dangerfield’s guidance

the customs’ officers went through the rooms, but could find nothing.

He begged them to look behind the bed and, when nothing came thence,

himself darted behind, pulled out a packet of papers, and began to cry

“Treason.” The officers took their find to a justice of the peace,

who, having regard to the suspicious circumstances, acted upon the

maxim, He who hides can find, and issued a warrant for Dangerfield’s

apprehension. An investigation was immediately ordered by the council.

On the next day, as Dangerfield was waiting to be examined, an officer

of the Mint happened to pass and, recognising in him an old offender,

had him arrested for coining false money. When Henry Coventry appeared

in the council-room he was met by the somewhat surprising intelligence

that his informer was in custody as a forger and coiner, and was known

for a noted criminal. A thorough examination made the truth of the

charges certain, besides bringing to light the fact, unfortunate for

the captain, that he had stood twice in the pillory, had only escaped

a third dose of the same punishment by breaking prison, and was in

fine a mischievous and notorious rascal. It was proved beyond doubt

that he had himself disposed the papers, containing a plain account of

the so-called Presbyterian Plot, in Mansell’s room and, since there

were no contraband goods there at all, had only brought the customs’

officials to perform what the refusal to grant a search warrant had

prevented him from doing otherwise. As the result on October 27

Dangerfield was committed to Newgate. He had in the meantime sent a

note to Mrs. Cellier, and by her assistance was let out for a couple of

days on bail. Thus the authorities were enabled to follow Dangerfield’s

committal by a search at Mrs. Cellier’s. Here on October 29 Sir

William Waller found two bundles of papers, one behind the kitchen

boiler, the other at the bottom of the meal tub, whence on this account

the name of the plot was derived. One contained a copy of Dangerfield’s

letter to the king, offering to make yet greater disclosures; the other

and larger proved to be a considerable amplification of the story he

had told on his first introduction at court. Fearing that the captain

would betray her, Mrs. Cellier had a message conveyed to him with the

encouraging words, which she boasted as her motto, “I never change,”

and was immediately after carried to the Gatehouse. The Lady Errant,

as she became known by her enemies, declared afterwards that her fear

was lest Dangerfield should falsely use their connection to his own

advantage. Whatever its nature, her fear was justified; for on October

31 he desired to be taken before Sir Robert Clayton, then Lord Mayor,

and made confession that the Presbyterian Plot was, in a word invented

by himself, a Sham destined to cover the intentions of the papists

and to ruin their adversaries. The papers found in the meal tub,

besides the treasonable letters he had put behind Colonel Mansell’s

bed, were dictated to him by the Countess of Powis, and approved by

Lord Peterborough and Mrs. Cellier. He had resisted the bribe of £2000

offered him by Lord Arundel to murder the king, but had undertaken to

the Earl of Powis to assassinate Lord Shaftesbury for a quarter of

that sum. Divers attempts had actually been made on the Whig leader;

twice he had been himself to the earl’s residence, Thanet House in

Aldersgate Street, and once Mrs. Cellier went in person, only to meet

with failure. All this had been with the knowledge and at the direction

of Roman Catholic priests. The next day Dangerfield was taken before

the council and affirmed the truth of his statement.[371]

In the tangle of accusations and informations which followed and were

laboriously examined at the council board, either side tried to throw

the blame of the intrigue on the other. Protestants were jubilant at

the detection of another Catholic plot, and swore by the whole truth

of Dangerfield’s confession. Catholics declared that the affair was

designed by Lord Shaftesbury to injure the Duke of York, and that their

leaders had been deceived by the captain, who had led them step by step

to catastrophe and hid the treasonable packet at Colonel Mansell’s with

the sole intention that his own sketch of the Presbyterian designs

might be discovered in Mrs. Cellier’s meal tub.[372] The intricacy

of these events will probably never be wholly developed. Every one

concerned was ready to lie in his own interest. Every one of the

principals did lie, it can hardly be doubted. Many committed perjury;

and some were probably suborned to perjure. The tale of complex untruth

and base endeavour is one that threatens to become dreary. Nevertheless

there are indications of the truth on which a general opinion may be

based. This is certain, that Dangerfield, perilous rogue as he was

known to be, was taken from prison by Mrs. Cellier, the confidante of

Lady Powis, supported in her house and at her cost. He was employed in

maintaining the cause of their religion, his employment was known to

Lord Peterborough, a friend of the Duke of York, and he was introduced

to the duke by him as an active agent against their common enemies. By

their account they took from him the tale of a Presbyterian plot; by

his own he invented it at their direction. Were the Catholic statements

accepted as true, they would convict the duke’s party of most gross

folly in trusting a man of character so depraved: more than that, for

the man had been paid to play the spy and, it was admitted by his

employers, had been given hints that it would be good to discover

plots of the nature of that which he retailed to them; and to accept

such a story without investigation, when it was known that the teller

had orders beforehand to collect materials, argues at least some

disingenuity. Nor is this all. There is reason to think that in some

essentials Dangerfield’s confession contained the truth. Supposing

that, as Lord Peterborough and his friends declared, the captain had

only hidden his parcel behind Mansell’s bed in order to be detected,

he would at least have taken the trouble to make discovery of evidence

against Mrs. Cellier certain. The papers concocted between them were

in his possession, and he had only to hide them without her knowledge

where they could be easily found by an officer. On the supposition

that he meant to turn informer against the Catholics their discovery

at Mrs. Cellier’s was necessary to his success. Without it there would

be no more than his bare word to shew that they had employed him at

all. As evidence the find of papers was invaluable to him. Yet he did

not even attempt to supply that evidence. So far from concealing the

incriminating notes himself, he gave them to Mrs. Cellier to dispose as

she thought best. The natural thing for her to do was to burn them and,

for all Dangerfield knew, she might have done so. For whatever reason

she preferred the other course. She gave the papers to her servant to

hide, and it was the servant who placed them in the regions of the

kitchen where they were found by Sir William Waller.[373] Dangerfield

could not possibly have known of their concealment or even of their

preservation. The fact that Mrs. Cellier chose to conceal the evidence

against her rather than deliver it to the council, which would have

been her best course had she been wholly innocent, or burn it to

destroy the traces of her guilt, if she were guilty, tells nothing; for

on Dangerfield’s arrest she hoped that he would still be faithful to

her, and was not in any case so clean of hand as to court an inquiry

into the nature of the services she had from him. She may well have

hoped that their connection would escape notice. But beyond this it is

plain that, even if she was not aware of Dangerfield’s intention to fix

the odium of a fictitious plot on the Protestant party, her relations

with him were of so intimate a kind that only wilful ignorance could

have saved her from knowledge of it. She knew of the treasonable papers

in Colonel Mansell’s room and, when a search warrant could not be

procured, it was she who advised Dangerfield to have recourse to the

customs house.[374] At least one who was closely acquainted with the

Catholic leaders and could not be suspected of prejudice declared the

whole affair to be a design of persons zealous for the Duke of York.

Lord Peterborough and Lady Powis, wrote the French ambassador, thought

to render a great service by bringing forward a man who would give

evidence against the Earl of Shaftesbury. They had merely tried to use

tools similar to those by which their enemies were thought to have

achieved success.[375]

Though it was admitted that Dangerfield had tried to fit the

Protestants with a forged plot and highly probable that the Catholics

had a hand in the forgery, there is yet something to be said on

the other side. The Presbyterian plot was a fiction; but there was

a basis of Dangerfield’s story that was not fictitious. An actual

movement, the lines of which are partly known, was at the moment being

concerted by the Whig leaders. The list of those concerned in the

plot drawn up by Dangerfield contains the names of many undoubtedly

implicated, and of many afterwards guilty of the treason of the Rye

House Plot, which grew out of the designs at this time.[376] Another

fact is of importance. To strengthen his story in the eyes of the

secretary of state, Dangerfield produced two letters belonging to Lord

Shaftesbury.[377] In his confession he declared he had stolen these on

one of the occasions when he went to kill the earl. There is no need

to linger over the tales of attempted assassination. Improbable as

they were in themselves, they are set beyond the bounds of credibility

by the informer’s halting narrative and the ridiculous excuses he

alleged for failure.[378] Nevertheless his production of the letters

makes it evident that he had been with the Whig leader. There can be

no doubt that he had some knowledge of the Whig designs. Most likely

he was intriguing with both parties at the same time in order to see

which he could with greater profit betray, and ended by betraying

both, though the Catholics, since they had trusted him the more, were

more severely affected by the results of his treachery. In the course

of the next year Mrs. Cellier and the Earl of Castlemaine were tried

for high treason. Lady Powis too had been committed to the Tower, but

the bill against her was ignored by the grand jury. Both cases rested

largely upon the evidence of Dangerfield, against whom records of crime

were produced by the defence. As his pardon did not cover a felony of

which he had been convicted, Mrs. Cellier was formally acquitted on the

ground that he was no good witness and that only one other appeared

against her; and when the pardon was afterwards corrected, the jury

before whom Castlemaine was tried refused to believe the word of a

man who bore the accumulated weight of sixteen convictions, guilty of

“six great enormous crimes,” and pronounced a verdict of not guilty

after an absence of only a few minutes from the box.[379] Few will be

found to quarrel with the judgment of the Lord Chancellor, who told

Dangerfield: “You are a fine fellow, first to come to his Majesty and

there tell him one story, then to my Lord Powis, and from thence to my

Lord Shaftesbury’s, discovering to one what discourse you held with the

other; and thus to bring one story to the council, another to the Earl

of Shaftesbury.”[380]

The Duke of York’s conduct in the Meal Tub Plot was characteristic

of him. He had brought Dangerfield to the king and by his imprudence

was the cause of much suspicion and distrust. No one felt certain how

the affair would turn out. People thought that James would “never

leave off tampering.”[381] He was a man with the smallest aptitude

for diplomacy. He was able neither to let events take their course

without interference nor by fingering ever to improve them. He was

always for action of a decided and generally a tactless kind. While

he persistently endeavoured to make others change their views, his

own were held with an obstinacy that nothing could uproot. His

continual desire for activity was one of the difficulties which most

hampered Charles II’s policy. Apart from his itch for management and

a preference shared with other politicians of the time for underhand

dealing his very presence at court was as a trumpet call to his

enemies. His severance from the Church of England was a severance from

the English people likewise. The Church of Rome was traditionally held

the enemy of the nation. It was responsible for many of the doubts and

difficulties of the restored monarchy. Its action was coupled in the

general mind with the aggression of foreign foes. For the heir to the

throne at such a time to go over to it was an act of great hardiness.

Nor could he do so without himself being proclaimed an enemy of the

people and disloyal to his duty. The horror expressed at the notion

that James should depart from the faith which his father had signed

with blood was increased by contemplation of the results attending

the step. The Roman Catholic religion, it was said, introduced an

_imperium in imperio_ and, were it settled in England, would at once

destroy the liberties and drain the wealth of the country.[382] It

seemed as if the duke must have some deep and sinister motive in

his mind to leave the religion that had been won by so much blood.

Many princes had changed their faith for reason of state, but the

instance of one who departed from the church of the people against the

clearest command of expedience and, as it seemed to them, the no less

clear showing of reason was unparalleled. And the subtle influence

of Jesuits who had wrought this in him was feared as well in the

present as for the future. So long as the duke remained at the king’s

right hand there was the added terror that he would shape the royal

policy in the direction whither he would direct it himself from the

throne. Nothing could be devised to cure the distrust aroused by his

attitude, except that he should return to the Protestant religion or

withdraw from the king’s presence. The latter was tried with success,

the former without. By the advice of Danby, when it was certain that

the elections for the parliament of 1679 were unfavourable to the

court, James was unwillingly sent out of England and ordered to take

up his abode in Brussels.[383] Episcopal powers of persuasion had

already been tried on him in vain. Before he set out another attempt

was made, with the like result. It is to the credit of his courage

that no prospect of advantage could bring him to surrender his faith.

The bishops brought forward every available argument, but were unable

to boast any satisfaction. Rome was hopeful that he would withstand

all similar proposals.[384] As the prosecution of the Popish Plot

drove the storm higher against the court and the Catholics, the

pressure put on James to recant his faith increased. A year later

when the duke was in London during the prorogation a strong attempt

was made by his friends. They knew that his conversion would mean the

greatest embarrassment to the host of enemies who built high upon his

opposition to the national temper. Should he consent they would be

compelled to change all their plans and perhaps fail to find another

weapon strong enough to serve the same purpose. At least he would be

able to remain at court. Charles spoke forcibly on the subject. A more

powerful advocate was found in the duchess, who despite James’ gross

and notorious profligacy exercised some influence on him and wished

at any price to escape a third exile. Months went by and the agitation

continued. James seemed to be weakening. As the day fixed for the

meeting of Parliament drew near, the gossip of Whitehall had it that he

would come over. Expectation was disappointed. On the day before the

session opened the duke and duchess set sail for Edinburgh, as Catholic

as ever.[385] There was nothing to be gained from him by argument. Nor

was he to be driven. Even Charles’ threat that unless he went to church

the Exclusion bill should be passed failed to move him. Conscience

and honour forbade him equally to deny and to dissemble his religion.

Besides, if he were to consent, Shaftesbury would only put about that

he had a dispensation from the pope and was still a Catholic at heart.

His mind was fixed. By God’s grace he was determined “never to do so

damnable a thing.”[386]

James’ mind was fixed on other points as well. He could not understand

that time had any value in the struggle between men or delay any merit.

The king’s policy of waiting was wholly unintelligible to him. Ultimate

success seemed to him to depend upon immediate triumph, and for

immediate triumph he was ready to stake everything. Each concession,

each dilatory advance, each deceptive retreat appeared as sure tokens

that he and the monarchy were on the verge of ruin, about to be hurled

together into the abyss. There was little enough of sympathy between

the brothers, who made a public show of friendship and in private kept

secrets to themselves. When he afterwards compiled the memoirs of his

life, James was able to exhibit some calmness in discussing their

relations; for, as he said, the king was sensible that their interest

was at bottom the same against common adversaries, since “his chief

security lay in having a successor they liked worse than himself.”

“He resolved therefore,” continued the writer, “to stick to the main

chance, and suffer no diminution in the prerogative during his time;

however, he thought it necessary to yield as far as he could to

convince the world of his sincerity, and to put his enemies so much in

the wrong (without parting with any essential thing) as that, if they

forced him to break, he might have friends enough to assist him.”[387]

At the time this series of penetrating afterthoughts did not cross the

duke’s mind. He had so little conception of Charles’ aim and point of

view as to be in constant terror that he would be abandoned to the

wrath of the opposing forces. He conceived himself, like his son-in-law

the Prince of Orange, to be dealing with a volatile being of pleasure,

and crying, as the captain of a ship to his helmsman in a storm:

Steady, steady, steady.[388] Only positive commands and elaborate

assurances, to which even then he attached little weight,[389] could

induce him to leave the court at moments of crisis when his presence

was likely to have the worst possible effects. He could never think

that his absence would not serve only to embolden his enemies. Present,

he was continually interfering and making unwise suggestions. Absent,

he did not cease pressing for his recall.[390] Nor did he cease from

Belgium and Scotland to press on the king counsels of desperation.

Anything tainted with moderation had to his nostrils the odour of

surrender. He had not been two months at Brussels before he was urging

Charles to steps which he knew must mean civil war. Ireland, Scotland,

the fleet, the guards, the garrisons, were still in the king’s hand.

The Prince of Orange had given assurance that he would be on the side

of royalty. Let Charles cease to countenance Monmouth and the party

with him, let him think on the fate of Edward II, Richard II, and

the king his father. “Now or never,” wrote the duke, “is the time to

save the monarchy.”[391] This was of a piece with all his advice. All

things, he thought, tended to a republic. Sir William Temple’s council

seemed to him to make the king little better than a Doge of Venice, and

to leave him so little support that the Exclusion bill could hardly be

resisted, a calamity by which the house of Stuart would be “absolutely

ruined and given up.” A short time after he expressed the opinion

that if Charles would not submit to be less than a Doge of Venice a

rebellion would be the necessary result. By June 1679 he was writing;

“Things have been let go to that pass that the best I can expect is

very great disorders, and unless something very vigorous is done within

a very few days, the monarchy is gone.”[392] Five months, six months,

a year later the same counsel was being reiterated.[393] While Charles

remained cool and undismayed in the midst of pressing danger, every

fresh event abashed the mind of James.[394] He could not appraise

facts at their true worth, since he was without insight; devoid of

imagination, he was unable to attribute to others powers he lacked

himself. His very friends spoke against his unenlightened zeal, and the

pope favoured him and his wife each with a brief on the subject.[395]

It was the beginning of that stream of protest which afterwards marked

with increasing volume the course of his downfall.

Advice to others to act boldly is not uncommon. But James was ready

on occasion to act on his own behalf. In May 1679 there appeared at

Brussels one Colonel Fitzpatrick, a man of brave counsel and of great

repute among his countrymen the Irish. He had come to arrange a rising

in Ireland. The Catholics were groaning under an intolerable yoke and

would follow him. By a small amount of assistance from foreign powers

the coasts could be seized, arms and munitions landed, and success

assured. Fitzpatrick was said to have for his project the consent of

the Irish Catholic clergy and to have carried letters of recommendation

into France before coming to Flanders. But French policy was opposed to

assisting James in the formation of a strong party and the money was

not to be obtained. Rather than run the risk of increasing hostility in

England by the Colonel’s presence near him, James dismissed him. With

much murmuring Fitzpatrick left Brussels.[396] Though this proposal

had to be refused, James kept the idea constantly before his mind.

The more certain that the king’s refusal to accept his violent advice

became, the more his thoughts turned to the possibility of violence

without the king’s participation. With the approach of Parliament in

the winter of 1680 the notion became further developed. James believed

that open force alone could re-establish the royal authority, on the

security of which he felt his own safety to rest. If he could compel

his brother to act, a final rupture might be precipitated. His enemies

would be forestalled, and out of the civil war that would ensue the

power of the throne might issue triumphant. It was his policy to push

matters to the point of extremity. When he was ordered from London to

avoid the session he took northwards with him the intention to see

to his own interest. Should the attack on him be pushed further, he

thought to unite parties in Scotland in the royal cause and by exciting

trouble there and in Ireland to bring the struggle to a head. Then he

believed that a larger party than many imagined would be on his side in

England.[397]

On the success of the Duke of York depended all the hopes of Roman

Catholics for the future of their religion in the English realm. He

was their secular head and the turning-point of their plans. His

movements were watched with the keenest interest by the authorities of

the church. Patience, prudence, and persistence was the policy they

advocated. Exhortations to obedience, expressions of attachment and

submission passed continually between him and his spiritual patrons.

The papal nuncio at Brussels informed him of the deep concern that

the Catholic religion had in his cause, and received the gratifying

assurance that he would make it his first care to propagate the true

faith by every means at his disposal.[398] How James fulfilled that

promise is well known. However much devotion he expressed to the wishes

of the Holy Father, his heart was more at one with the Society of Jesus

than with the court of Rome. He chose Jesuits for his confessors,

begged emoluments for them, took their policy for his guide. While

his course drew from the Jesuits inexhaustible and still unexhausted

praise, it was met by a series of remonstrances waxing in indignation

from the pontiff. In the year 1687 fifty candidates for orders in the

society were being prepared for work in the English province. King

James, it is said, informed Father John Keynes, the provincial, that

double or treble that number would be necessary to accomplish what he

destined for Jesuit hands.[399] The result declared his wisdom. The

mystery of the Revolution was that William of Orange, a Protestant

invading the realm of a Catholic monarch, had the support of the

Catholic emperor at the instigation of the pope. From the fierce battle

of the Popish Plot Charles II tore a prize to deliver to the man by

whose ill-judged efforts he had most nearly been robbed of it. At his

death he left a kingdom compact, loyal, prosperous, ready to carry on

the traditions that had been built up with labour and in the teeth

of disaster. When that day came James behaved in perfect accord with

his character. Within four years he had thrown away the fruits of a

struggle that had lasted for a quarter of a century, and paid the

penalty of folly and invincible obstinacy by the dragging existence of

a pretender, an exile, a dependent, and a criminal.

CHAPTER III

SHAFTESBURY AND CHARLES

Of all men whose reputation was made or raised by the Popish Plot, none

have since maintained their fame at so even a height as John Dryden.

His person but not his name suffered from the changes of fortune,

and at a distance of more than two centuries the sum of continuous

investigation has little to add to the judgments passed on his times

by the greatest of satirists. The flashes of Dryden’s insight illumine

more than the light shed by many records. In politics, no less than in

society, his genius had ample room. The Plot gave him a subject worthy

of a master:—

Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies

To please the fools and puzzle all the wise:

Succeeding times did equal folly call

Believing nothing or believing all.

This plot, which failed for want of common sense,

Had yet a deep and dangerous consequence;

For as, when raging fevers boil the blood.

The standing lake soon floats into a flood,

And every hostile humour which before

Slept quiet in its channels bubbles o’er;

So several factions from this first ferment

Work up to foam and threat the government.[400]

The lines are a witness against the two great parties whose intrigues

were woven to menace the security of the English state. Oates’ false

oaths ruined the hopes of the Roman Catholics: the designs of the

English Whigs were grounded on them.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, was the first statesman to

learn the art of organising support for policy from an entire nation.

His course in life was determined by the belief that it is the business

of a politician to succeed, and to that mass of mankind which is of the

same opinion he should be at once apostle and martyr. No means which

made for the end he had in view came amiss to his hand; by using good

and bad alike, he won the power of drawing round him men who could

make some show of virtuous conduct in company with scoundrels of the

choicest villainy; and he used them with infinite address. From the age

of twenty years he had lived in the glare of public life, ever rising

on the tide, true to his own principles and false to all whom in their

interest he could serviceably betray. In the Civil War he fought for

the king and served him well. As a member of Barebones’ Parliament he

was for Cromwell against the Saints. When the Protector threw the lot

for absolute rule, it was in him that parliamentary government found

its keenest supporter. To this course Shaftesbury remained faithful.

The throne on which “foolish Ishbosheth” sat became more rickety under

his attacks. When that shadow of his father vanished from the scene,

he strove with success against the despotism of the army. He was sent

by the Convention Parliament as one of the two commissioners to invite

Charles II to return to his kingdom. Under the restored monarchy

Shaftesbury found a fair and a wider field for the exercise of talents

which he devoted to the cause of religious and political freedom and

commercial enterprise. At his request John Locke drew for the state of

Carolina a constitution in which toleration was a prominent idea. In

the office of Lord Chancellor he earned an abiding reputation for speed

and purity of justice. He was an ardent foe of the Dutch republic, the

threatening rival of English prosperity. He opposed the Stop of the

Exchequer. As the last act in the service of government he counselled

the Declaration of Indulgence, for when that was withdrawn there was

nothing more to hope from the crown in the fight for liberty. At last

he knew the Catholic tendency of the king and, learning perhaps the

dupe that he had been made by the Treaty of Dover, flung himself into

the bitterest opposition.

The foundation of the Whig party may be referred to the year 1675,

when the French ambassador first contracted an alliance with a cabal

consisting of four lords, Buckingham, Wharton, Ogle and, chief among

them, Shaftesbury,[401] From that time onwards Shaftesbury enjoyed

a growing ascendency over his partners. The fight over the bill of

Non-Resistance brought them closely together; their victory, though it

was by an artifice, gave them strength. But while the new party gained

followers in Parliament and support in the country, it was some time

before further success was achieved. The Cavalier, otherwise known

by the nicknames of the Pensioned and the Pump, Parliament depended

too much on the court to allow the possibility of complete triumph

to the opposition.[402] Away from Westminster the terror of popery,

with a Catholic successor to the crown in view, dominated the country,

and on this basis the programme of the Whigs was constructed. Popery

and slavery, to quote Shaftesbury’s memorable phrase, went hand in

hand. The Whigs aimed at securing the liberties of the nation and

reducing the Catholic religion to impotence. The overthrow of Danby

with his policy of Anglican supremacy, the dissolution of the House

of Commons which lavish and ingenious corruption had bound to his

side, the destruction of the Catholic strength in the House of Lords,

the downfall of the Duke of York; these were the main ideas in their

system. Yet so long as the Lord Treasurer led the Commons by his

purse-strings they were unable to mark progress in the open, however

much they might gain behind the scenes. So the next two years brought

only failure. When Parliament met in February 1677 after a prorogation

of fifteen months, the Whigs, resting their case on an obsolete statute

of Edward III, elected to argue that after so long an interval it had

no legal existence. The move resulted in immediate victory to the

government, and Buckingham, Shaftesbury, Salisbury, and Wharton, the

chief movers in the Lords, being ordered to ask pardon of the House

for their offence, and refusing, were sent to the Tower. Thus, said

Marvell, a prorogation without precedent was to be warranted by an

imprisonment without example. Danby was strong enough to obtain an

unconditional vote of £600,000. When however he introduced a bill for

the better securing of the Protestant religion in case of a Catholic

heir to the throne, though its drastic provisions passed the Lords

easily enough, the mere fact that it seemed to legalise such a state

of things roused against it the fury of the Commons, who threw it out,

with the added indignity of noting in their journal, Because the body

of the bill was contrary to the title.[403] After a few weeks three

of the imprisoned peers made submission and were set at liberty; but

Shaftesbury still lay in the Tower when in November the government

reckoned another stroke to its credit in the marriage of William of

Orange and Mary of York. It was not until February 1678 that he was

released. To human reckoning it seemed as if the Whig cause was lost.

Danby was firmer in power than ever, the royal marriage bade fair

to conciliate the nation, the peace of Nymeguen was approaching its

tardy conclusion. Well-informed persons believed that the leaders of

the opposition were about to confess their defeat and bid farewell to

politics.[404] Eight months later an auspicious wind blew Titus Oates

on to the scene, and the aspect of affairs was completely changed.

There have not been wanting either among his contemporaries or in later

times some to assert that Oates was procured and his story directed

by the Earl of Shaftesbury. Once and again the case has broken down.

Neither is there the slightest evidence for the notion, nor has it the

least intrinsic probability. So clear a head as Shaftesbury’s could

never have been guilty of that monstrous stupidity. Clumsy forgery,

feeble promises, lame excuses, bald melodrama characterised the

informer’s entry into public life. The tale he told was full of gross

improbabilities. And with what truth it contained Shaftesbury could

not have been acquainted. But what makes certainty still more certain

is that on his first appearance Oates was so little sure of support

from any quarter that he not only exonerated the Duke of York from

complicity in the plot, but was so disobliging to the Whigs as to name

him for a possible victim. The king at first thought he saw traces of

Shaftesbury’s hand, but was soon convinced that he erred. Before they

had time to gauge the situation the Whigs laughed at the Plot as an

artifice for keeping the army on foot.[405] Yet though he had no claim

to be Oates’ tutor, Shaftesbury welcomed him with alacrity. Fortune as

if from heaven had fallen at his feet, and he prepared to make the most

of it, and at the same time to vindicate the penetration of Colbert

Croissy, who had called him “le plus fourbe, le plus injuste, le plus

malhonnête d’Angleterre.”

The wished occasion of the plot he takes,

Some circumstance he finds, but more he makes;

and, since the making of circumstance lies as well in the reception as

in the invention of facts, justice must be admitted to the second line

equally with the first. Circumstance was exactly what Shaftesbury could

provide. He created the atmosphere for Oates to work in.

The miscreant who a few weeks before had been begging from the Jesuit

fathers rose to an undreamed height of luxury and influence. Repeated

addresses from the Commons obtained for him lodgings which he shared

with Dr. Tonge in Whitehall.[406] The modest sum of £12 a week allotted

him “for dyett and expenses” was eked out by occasional gifts of £50

“as of free gift and royal bounty” and the payment of long bills

incurred for his witnesses at trials. Within twelve months the total

amount made out to him reached the figure of £945 : 8 : 10. Yet Oates

was but one of a host whom the popular fury enabled to batten on the

royal resources; and during the same period the accounts of the secret

service money, disbursed almost exclusively to informers, showed an

expenditure of nearly £5000.[407] The Salamanca doctor made the most of

his luck. Robed like a bishop and puffed with insolence he became the

darling of the Whig party. He set up as “a solemn housekeeper” and kept

a fine table. Each morning there waited at his lodgings to dress him

two or three gentlemen who vied for the honour of holding his basin.

He was received by the primate at Lambeth. The Bishop of Ely welcomed

him as a frequent guest at dinner and was unable to set bounds to the

brutality of his conversation, till Sir John Reresby administered a

merited rebuke. He received the public thanks of the House of Lords.

The House of Commons made the Duke of Monmouth responsible for his

safety, the Lord Chamberlain for his lodging, the Lord High Treasurer

for his nourishment. His sermons were public events, his person

followed by admiring crowds. Popular odes were composed in his honour,

popular dinners were given him in the city, designs represented him

knocking the tiara from the head of “that infallible fop, the pope,”

or more exalted still, as an angel looking down from heaven. Among

English merchants abroad his health was drunk next to that of the king.

Everywhere he was courted, fêted, acknowledged. “Whig peers,” writes

Sir George Sitwell, “supported him by their subscriptions. Whig peers

welcomed him to their houses in London and in the country. Whig peers

rolled him down in their coaches to aid by his unblushing presence the

election of Whig candidates, Whig peers defended him in council and

flocked to support him at his trials, while their political followers

were engaged in threatening and hustling the witnesses.”[408] Oates had

become for the moment the representative of the aspirations of the Whig

party.

In this the influence of Shaftesbury is clearly visible. Though he

did not procure Oates’ appearance, it cannot be supposed that the

informer’s subsequent steps were without his knowledge and approval. At

his first examination by the council Oates had declared that he knew

no more than he had said against any person of what quality soever.

Within two months he thought better of his memory in a way that points

to refreshment from another source. The wife of one of the gentlemen

of the bedchamber was entrusted with a message that, if the king would

give way to it, Oates had somewhat to swear against no less a person

than the queen. The royal leave was granted. On November 25 therefore

Oates declared to the king in full council that if all other attempts

upon his Majesty’s life had failed the queen was to have been employed

to murder her husband. Three days later he appeared at the bar of the

House of Commons and raised his strident voice with the words, “I do

accuse the queen for conspiring the death of the king and contriving

how to compass it.” It was a ludicrous invention of having heard the

queen in conversation with certain Jesuits approve the plan for

Charles’ assassination and promise to assist it. Bedloe had a similar

story, which the Lords also heard as well as that of Oates. When they

asked what the two had meant by keeping back their information, Oates

replied that by “no other person of quality” he had meant none other

of the peers. Bedloe said he had forgotten. The House of Commons,

stirred by their deep affection and care for the royal person, voted

an immediate address for the removal of the consort and her household

from Whitehall, and sent to beg the Lords’ concurrence; but the

Lords, dissatisfied with the depositions laid before them, refused,

under protest of Shaftesbury and two of his followers, to join in the

vote. Their consideration had been won by the queen’s behaviour on

the subject of Godfrey’s murder, and they refused to allow her to be

molested. In public she bore herself bravely, but her intimates knew

how greatly she had been distressed by the attack. By an order from the

king Oates was placed in strict confinement, his papers were seized,

his servants dismissed, and free access to his rooms restrained. A

strong remonstrance was prepared by the Commons, and Charles closed the

incident by restoring the villain to his former liberty.[409]

The attack on the queen affords a clue to the ideas of both adversaries

in the great battle that was being waged in the English state

between authority and revolution. Mrs. Elliot, wife of Elliot of the

bedchamber, had been the agent who took Oates’ message to the king. She

had also spoken to Tonge, and in a significant statement to the House

of Lords confessed she had been sent to him by Lady Gerard of Bromley.

The mention of this lady’s name throws a ray of light on the doubtful

intrigue, for she was in close connection with the Whig leaders; and

were it in any case permissible to suppose that Oates had acted without

assurance of support in bringing forward a charge of so delicate a

nature, her appearance in the background would make it certain that

this was not so. It may be taken that the move was directed from the

headquarters of the Whig party. What then was the object? Catherine

had never played any part whatever in politics. In obtaining favour

for those of her religion she had held strictly to the terms of her

marriage treaty. After the first shock at her husband’s faithless

impudence she had passed her time in gaiety, dancing, and frivolity.

Only one end could be served by attempting to prove her a party to the

Plot. It was to obtain her divorce and to marry the king to a wife

who should bear him Protestant children. The knowledge of Catherine’s

childlessness had given rise before to talk of a similar project.[410]

If it could actually be brought to completion and Charles beget a

Protestant heir to the throne, there seemed a fair chance that the

clouds which hung over the future of England would be dispelled. Desire

for power alone did not then actuate Shaftesbury, but a purer hope for

his country’s prosperity. For had the scheme of divorce borne fruit and

the Duke of York, with all the unrest and insecurity that his presence

denoted, been removed from the succession by the appearance of a child

who could hardly have been educated except as a Protestant, Shaftesbury

could not have hoped himself to exercise a decisive influence on the

king’s policy. The storm gave Shaftesbury his power; when calm returned

it would dissolve. This is his claim to real statesmanship. He was

willing, it must be believed, to sacrifice power to principle, and to

plan, though with odious implements, advantage to the nation, while he

contemplated for himself a relapse into insignificance. What followed

under Charles II’s successor justified his position. Swift changes

transformed his schemes and drove him to counsels of extremity, but the

Revolution suspends judgment against him. The principle he embodied was

that which William the deliverer came to England to save from utter

ruin, the reasoned liberty of thought and action. For that he worked

and made others work without sparing, bribed while his own hands were

clean of gold, joined while his private life was pure with profligates

of unrestrained license; for that he planned murder and brewed

rebellion; for that he “fretted the pigmy body to decay”;[411] for that

he died. This particular proposal was not without recommendation. It

was the simplest way out of the difficulty. It could cause no political

commotion in the country. No principle would be overset by it nor any

tradition overruled. It might be supposed to be not unpalatable to

Charles. The English Reformation had followed one divorce; another

might have rendered the English Revolution unnecessary. There was not

however the smallest chance of success, for the king was unalterably

opposed to anything of the sort. Badly as he had behaved to Catherine,

he was not without gratitude and affection for her and was constant

in his resolution not to add to his other faults the graver one of

desertion.[412] Further, Charles was determined to let the royal

power suffer injury in no respect. When the subject of the accusation

prepared against the queen was first broached, he said privately that

he was willing to give Oates line enough. It was the secret of the

king’s whole policy during the agitation of the Plot. He was playing

the Whig party as a skilful angler plays his fish. Each length of

line run out seemed to be the last of his reserve. Throughout his

reign Charles had been striving to restore the power of the monarchy

in England. Now it looked as if all his efforts had been in vain. His

opponents appeared about to gain the final victory. The king’s only

chance was to let them exhaust themselves by the violence of their

onslaught.