world round Milton and Bunyan to awake indignation. Samuel Butler
was a man of genius, but his 'Hudibras,' which appeared in =1663=,
shows but poorly by the side of 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Pilgrim's
Progress.' This mock-heroic account of a Puritan knight is the work
of a strong writer, who can find nothing better to do with the
warriors and disputants who had lately controlled England than to
laugh at them. The mass of Restoration poetry was far weaker than
'Hudibras,' whilst its dramatic writers vied with one another in the
expression of licentious thought either in prose or in the regular
heroic couplets which were, at this time, in vogue. It was, indeed,
impossible to put much human passion into two neat lines which had
to be made to rhyme; but at Court love-making had been substituted
for passion, and the theatres, now re-opened, after they had been
suppressed by the Puritans, were meant for the vicious Court and not
for the people at large.
3. =Reason and Science.=--The satire of Butler, and the
licentiousness of the dramatists, both sprang from a reaction
against the severe morality of the Puritans; but it would have been
a poor prospect for the generation following that of Puritan
repression if the age had not produced any positive work of its own.
Its work was to be found in the increase of respect for human
reason. In the better minds amongst the clergy of the Restoration,
the reasonable character of the Church of England was more than ever
predominant. A few, such as Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, and
Stillingfleet, Dean of St. Paul's, were even anxious to find some
way of comprehension by which Dissenters might be reconciled to the
Church, whilst others, like Morley and Barrow, attached far more
importance to arguments addressed to the understanding, than to that
uniformity of ceremonial which had been so dear to the mind of Laud.
Still more important was the spread of devotion to natural science.
The Royal Society, founded for its promotion in =1660=, brought
together men who thought more about air-pumps than about the
mysteries of theology; and it was mainly the results of their
inquiries which made any renewed triumph of Puritanism impossible.
In 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the outer world was treated as a mere
embarrassment to the pursuit of spiritual perfection. By the Fellows
of the Royal Society it was treated as calling for reverent
investigation, in order that, in the words of Bacon, nature might be
brought into the service of man by his obedience to her laws.
4. =Charles II. and Toleration. 1667.=--In the long run the rise of
the scientific spirit would conduce to religious toleration, because
scientific men have no reason to desire the suppression of any form
of religious belief. The first step taken after the restoration in
the direction of religious toleration had come from Charles (see p.
581), who was actuated partly by a sneaking fondness for the Roman
Catholic Church and partly by dislike of being dictated to by
Parliament. He therefore, after Clarendon's fall, gave his
confidence mainly to men who, for various reasons, were inclined to
support his wishes in this respect.
5. =Buckingham and Arlington. 1667-1669.=--Amongst these men the
principal were the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington.
Buckingham, the son of the favourite of Charles I.--'everything by
turns and nothing long'--was trying his hand at politics by way of
amusement. Arlington, who, like Charles, hardly knew whether he was
Catholic or Protestant, was entrusted, as Secretary of State, with
the direction of foreign affairs. He was a man of considerable
ability, but perfectly unscrupulous in shifting his ground to suit
his personal ambition. Both hated Clarendon as sour and austere, and
both were ready to support the king in any scheme upon which he
might set his heart. The Dissenters confined to prison were
liberated, and a Bill prepared to modify the ceremonies of the
Church, so as to enable the expelled Presbyterians to re-enter the
Church. When, however, Parliament met in February, =1668=, it showed
its determination to have nothing to do with either toleration or
comprehension (see p. 598). It offered the king 300,000_l._, but
only under the implied condition that he would abandon his scheme.
Charles took the money and dropped his scheme. He prorogued
Parliament in May, and did not re-assemble it till October, =1669=.
Whilst Parliament was not in session Charles sheltered the
Dissenters from persecution, and even thought of dissolving
Parliament. Albemarle (see p. 580), however, cautiously reminded him
that, even if he got a new Parliament in which the Dissenters and
their friends were predominant, it would probably cause him trouble
by wanting to persecute those who had hitherto persecuted the
Dissenters. Accordingly Charles, who hated nothing so much as
trouble, not only allowed the old Parliament to meet again, but even
issued a proclamation enforcing the penal laws against Dissenters.
6. =The Triple Alliance. 1668.=--In =1668= a triple alliance was
formed between England, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden, to put an
end to the War of Devolution (see p. 593). Its originators were De
Witt, and Sir William Temple, the English ambassador at the Hague.
The allies demanded that Louis should content himself with certain
strong towns on his northern frontier which he had already conquered
from Spain, and should desist from attempting to conquer more. Louis
assented, and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed on these
conditions. In England there was already a rising feeling against
the French, and Charles acquired no little popularity by his
supposed firmness. In reality he had betrayed the secrets of the
alliance to Louis, and had only shown his teeth to gain good terms
for himself from the French king.
7. =Charles's Negotiations with France. 1669-1670.=--Louis owed the
Dutch a deep grudge, and set himself to win Charles to neutrality,
if not to active help, in the war which he now purposed to make
against them. Charles disliked the Dutch as the commercial rivals of
England, and was ready to sell himself to Louis if only the price
offered was high enough. Though Charles never suffered religion of
any kind to be a check on his conduct, his facile nature yearned
after the imposing authority of the Roman Church. In =1669= his
brother, James, avowed himself a Catholic, and in the same year
Charles, under the strictest secrecy, declared his own conversion to
a small circle of men whom he could trust. Before the end of the war
he offered Louis support against the Dutch, but asked such enormous
concessions in return that Louis refused to agree to them. Charles,
before lowering the terms of his bargain with Louis, drove another
bargain with his Parliament. In the spring of =1670=, by dropping
his demand for toleration, he obtained a grant of 300,000_l._ a year
for eight years. In return he gave the royal assent to a second
Conventicle Act, even more stringent than the first.
[Illustration: Temple Bar, London, built by Sir Christopher Wren in
1670. Taken down in 1878 and since rebuilt at Waltham Cross.]
8. =The Treaty of Dover. 1670.=--Having secured a grant, Charles
prorogued Parliament, which he had deceived by giving it to
understand that he had abandoned the idea of toleration, and turned
to Louis. Louis sent over Charles's youngest sister, Henrietta,
Duchess of Orleans, to conclude an alliance, and on June 1, =1670=,
a treaty between England and France was secretly signed at Dover.
Charles agreed to join Louis in his projected war against the Dutch,
by sending an English force of 6,000 men to serve in the French
army, and to assist Louis to seize upon the territories of the
Spanish monarchy in the event of the death of Charles II. of Spain
without male heirs. Charles was also to acknowledge himself a
Catholic whenever he thought fit to do so. To support Charles
against his subjects in case of their resisting him in the
declaration of his conversion, Louis was to give him 154,000_l._ and
the aid of 6,000 troops to be employed in England in his defence.
Moreover, Charles was to receive 230,000_l._ a year during the
proposed war, and thirty French ships were to serve under an English
admiral. At the end of the war he was to receive Walcheren, Sluys
and Cadsand from the Dutch Republic, and ultimately, if Louis made
good his claims to the Spanish monarchy, he was to gain from Spain,
Ostend, Minorca, and various territories in South America. Charles
II. was no more scrupulous than his father had been about using the
troops of foreign princes to suppress the opposition of his own
subjects, but he was shrewd enough to know--what Charles I. had
never known--that foreign princes would not lend him troops unless
he gave them something in return. The breach of the Triple Alliance
and the assistance offered by Charles to Louis in the proposed war
against the Dutch were considered in France to be a fair equivalent
for the payments which Louis had bound himself to make. It was
another question whether Charles could be kept to his engagements.
To secure this as much as possible Louis sent him over a new French
mistress, Louise de Keroualle. Charles soon created her Duchess of
Portsmouth, and she fulfilled her duty to her own king by betraying
to him all the secrets of her lover.
9. =The Cabal. 1670.=--After Clarendon's fall Charles had been his
own chief minister. The ministers whom he consulted from time to
time were known as his Cabal, a word then applied to any body of
secret advisers, without carrying with it the opprobrious meaning
which it now has. At last the wits discovered that the initials of
five ministers who were principally consulted about the time of the
Treaty of Dover, Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and
Lauderdale, spelt the word cabal, and writers have since talked
about them as forming what has been called the Cabal Ministry,
though no such ministry, in the modern sense of the word, ever
existed. Not only did they not form a council meeting for purposes
of government, but, though they agreed together in favouring
toleration, they disagreed on other points. Nor were they usually
consulted by Charles in a body. Sometimes he took the advice of
persons not of their number; sometimes he took the advice of some of
them only, whilst he kept the others entirely in the dark. Thus
Clifford, who was a brave and honest Catholic, and Arlington, who
would support any measure as long as it was his interest to do so,
knew all about the Treaty of Dover, whilst Buckingham, Lauderdale,
and Ashley were in complete ignorance of it. Of Buckingham and
Arlington enough has been already said (see p. 599). Lauderdale, who
had little to do with English affairs, kept himself almost entirely
to the task of building up the king's authority in Scotland, where
he had already got together an army completely at Charles's
disposal. The character of Ashley deserves a longer consideration.
10. =Ashley's Policy.=--Anthony Ashley Cooper,[28] who had been
created Lord Ashley since the Restoration, had changed sides again
and again during the late troubles. He was a born party-leader, and
had signalised himself as a youth at Exeter College, Oxford, by
leading a successful revolt of the freshmen against the older
undergraduates, who, according to custom, tried to skin the chins of
the freshmen and to force them to drink a nauseous compound prepared
for the occasion. Though in party conflict he was quite unscrupulous
and despised no means which would enable him to gain his ends, he
had the statesmanlike qualities of common sense and moderation. He
had deserted Charles I. when he leant upon the Catholics (see p.
541), had supported Cromwell in his struggle with the zealots of the
Barebone's Parliament (see p. 566), and had left him when he
rejected the constitutional scheme of the first Parliament of the
Protectorate (see p. 570). In disgust at the humours of the Rump and
the army, he had done everything in his power to hasten the
Restoration, and had soon shown hostility to Clarendon and to the
persecuting laws of the Cavalier Parliament. In fact, there were two
principles to which he was never entirely false, a love of
Parliamentary government and a love of toleration, which last was
based, not as was that of Oliver, upon sympathy with religious zeal
of every kind, but upon dislike of clerical interference. At present
he attached himself to Charles, because he knew of Charles's alleged
wish to establish toleration, and knew nothing of the conspiracy
against Parliament on which Charles had embarked, or of Charles's
secret design to favour the Roman Church under cover of a general
scheme of toleration.
[Footnote 28: Two Christian names were exceedingly rare in the
seventeenth century.]
11. =Buckingham's Sham Treaty. 1671.=--To deceive those who were in
ignorance of the secret treaty of the previous year, Buckingham was
sent to Paris to negotiate a sham treaty in which all mention of
Charles's conversion was omitted, and the whole of the money offered
by Louis represented as given solely for the war. Charles
particularly enjoyed making a fool of Buckingham, who imagined
himself to be exceedingly clever, and he had also the temporary
satisfaction of gaining the hearty support of Ashley as well as
Buckingham, because Ashley was quite ready to accept Louis' help in
a joint enterprise for crushing the commerce of the Dutch, and had
no scruples about abandoning the Triple Alliance. Charles was the
more ready to begin the war because he had lately succeeded in
obtaining from Parliament another 800,000_l._ on the false plea that
he wanted the money to enable him to hold head at sea against the
French as well as the Dutch. As soon as the money was obtained he
prorogued Parliament.
12. =The Stop of the Exchequer. 1672.=--Charles prudently delayed
the declaration of his conversion to a more convenient season, but
the opening of the war was fixed for the spring of =1672=. In spite
of the large sums which he drew from Louis and from Parliament, his
finances were in hopeless confusion, because of the enormous amount
of money which he squandered on his numerous mistresses and his
illegitimate children. It is said that the yearly income of the
Duchess of Portsmouth was 40,000_l._, and that in one year she
received no less than 136,000_l._ A caricature published in Holland
aptly represented him as standing between two women, with empty
pockets hanging out. At this time he had in his exchequer
1,400,000_l._, lent to him by the goldsmiths who, in those days,
acted as bankers. On January 2, =1672=, probably at Clifford's
suggestion, he refused to repay the principal, and arbitrarily
diminished the interest from 12 to 6 per cent.[29] In consequence of
this stop of the exchequer, as it was called, many of the goldsmiths
became bankrupt, but Clifford became a peer and Lord High Treasurer.
[Footnote 29: In the time of James I. the usual interest was 10 per
cent. The Long Parliament paid 8.]
[Illustration: Anthony Ashley-Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury,
1621-1683: from the National Portrait Gallery.]
13. =The Declaration of Indulgence. 1672.=--On March 15, Charles,
though still hesitating to proclaim himself a Catholic, issued a
Declaration of Indulgence. Claiming a dispensing power,[30] he
suspended all penal laws in matters ecclesiastical, affecting either
recusants or non-conformists, thus giving complete religious liberty
to Roman Catholics as well as to Dissenters. To this measure, wise
and statesmanlike in itself, but marred by the motives of its author
and by its defiance of the law and of public opinion, Ashley gave
his hearty support. He was rewarded with the Earldom of Shaftesbury.
He had shortly before been made Lord Chancellor: being the last who
held that post without being a lawyer. At that time the decisions of
the Court of Chancery were still given in accordance with the view
taken by the Chancellor of what seemed fair and equitable, and did
not therefore require any elaborate legal knowledge. Even
Shaftesbury's bitterest enemies acknowledged that he was
scrupulously just.
[Footnote 30: The right of pardon allows the king to remit the
consequences to a particular person of a sentence passed on him. The
right of dispensation allows him to remit beforehand the
consequences of a breach of a law either to such persons as are
named, or to all persons generally who may commit such a breach.]
14. =The Second Dutch War of the Restoration. 1672.=--Both Charles
and Louis had resolved to take the Dutch by surprise. On March 13,
Admiral Holmes, obeying orders, attacked a rich Dutch merchant fleet
sailing up the Channel, before war was declared, but only succeeded
in taking two vessels. In the war now begun the discipline of the
English navy was worse, and that of the Dutch navy better, than it
had been in the former war (see p. 591). On June 7 there was a
fierce sea-fight in Southwold Bay, in which the Dutch had slightly
the advantage. Louis, on his part, crossed the Rhine, and fell upon
the Dutch territory. As a land attack had not been expected, the
military preparations were incomplete, and the fortresses out of
repair. One place after another capitulated to the French. The young
William III., Prince of Orange, Charles's nephew, had been named
Captain-General, but his army was too small to encourage him to risk
a battle. Then De Witt took a heroic resolution. On June 18 he cut
the dykes which protected the low-lying land from the sea which
stood at a higher level. In rushed the waters, Louis found his
progress stopped. De Witt had the blame of the failure to prevent
the invasion; William, coming after him, had the credit of the
resistance. The Republic needed a strong hand to preserve it, and
the office of Stadholder was revived and given to William. Shortly
afterwards De Witt, together with his brother, was brutally murdered
at the Hague. William, who detested De Witt for having so long
deprived him of the power which he considered his due, not only took
no steps to hinder the assassination, but actually protected the
murderers. Disgraceful as his conduct was, he had a temper as heroic
as De Witt's. Buckingham came to urge him to submit to Louis'
terms. "Do you not see," said the Englishman, "that the Republic is
lost?" "I know one sure means of never seeing it," was William's
firm reply--"to die on the last dyke." His confidence was justified.
Louis could not pierce the girdle of waters which surrounded the
Dutch towns, and, returning to Paris, brought the campaign to an
end.
15. ='Delenda est Carthago.' 1673.=--On February 4,
=1673=.--Charles, having once more spent all his money, again met
his Parliament. Shaftesbury urged the voting of supply for the war
with the Dutch, whom he styled the eternal enemies of England,
quoting the saying of Cato--_Delenda est Carthago_--as though they
were to be destroyed as being to England what Carthage had been to
Rome. So far as the war was concerned, the House of Commons answered
his appeal by offering 1,260,000_l._, though they kept back the Bill
till they had brought him to terms.
16. =Withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence. 1673.=--It was at
the withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence that the House was
aiming. In vain Charles simulated firmness, declaring himself to be
resolved to stick to his declaration. The Commons bitterly resented
his interference with the law. Forty statutes, it was said, had been
violated by the Declaration, and the house passed a resolution that
'penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by
act of Parliament.' Both sides were anxious to limit the question to
ecclesiastical statutes: Charles, because the powers over the Church
conferred on the Tudor sovereigns were vague, and therefore more
defensible than those exercised by them in political matters; the
Commons, because they had precedents of Parliamentary resistance to
dispensations granted to recusants, whereas former kings had usually
been allowed without contradiction to suspend the law in commercial
matters. Charles tried to evade the summons of the Commons, but the
Lords having come on March 7 to the same conclusion as the other
House, he gave way on the 8th and recalled his Declaration. As no
new statute was passed on the subject, the legal question remained
just where it was before.
17. =The Test Act. 1673.=--Charles had entered on a struggle with
Parliament and had been defeated. The Royalist Parliament of =1661=
was still Royalist so far as the maintenance of the throne was
concerned, but it had entered on a course of opposition which had
brought it into open collision with the king. From first to last the
chief characteristic of this Parliament was its resolution to
maintain the supremacy of the Church, and it was now obvious that
the Church was in more danger from Roman Catholics than from
Dissenters. Though Charles's conversion (see p. 600) was unknown, it
was no secret that the Duke of York, the heir to the throne, was a
Catholic, and, in spite of the veil thrown over the terms of the
Treaty of Dover, the danger of an invasion by French troops in
support of the English Catholics was obvious to all. For the first
time since the Restoration a Bill was brought in to relieve
Protestant Dissenters, and, though this proposal came to nothing,
the very fact of its being made showed that a new state of feeling
was growing up. Arlington, seeing how things stood, and wishing to
oust the Catholic Clifford from the Treasury that he might be his
successor, put up a member of the Commons to propose a Bill which
soon became law under the name of the Test Act. By it, no one was to
hold office who refused to take the test--that is to say, to make a
declaration of his disbelief in the doctrine of Transubstantiation
and to receive the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of
England. It was only after Charles had given his assent to this Act
on March 29 that the proposed grant of 1,260,000_l._ was actually
made.
18. =Results of the Test Act. 1673.=--Though most Dissenters were
excluded from office by the latter clause of the Test Act, there
were some who did not feel their opposition to the Church to be so
strong as to preclude them from taking the Sacrament occasionally
according to its rites. Every honest Roman Catholic, on the other
hand, was at once driven from office. The Duke of York surrendered
the Admiralty and Clifford the Treasury. The Test Act was not a
persecuting Act in the sense in which the Conventicle Act and the
Five Mile Act were persecuting Acts. It inflicted no direct penalty
on the mere holding of a special belief, or on the attendance on a
special form of worship, but excluded persons holding a certain
religious belief from offices the retention of which, according to
the prevalent conviction, would be dangerous to the State.
19. =Continuance of the Dutch War. 1673.=--The Treasurer-ship, taken
from Clifford, was given, not to Arlington, but to Sir Thomas
Osborne, whose sentiments, being strongly in favour of maintaining
the predominance of the Church of England, were likely to commend
him to the goodwill of the Houses. In foreign policy he represented
what was fast becoming a general opinion, that, as the main danger
to England came from France, it had been a mistake to go to war with
the Dutch. This belief was driven home by disasters at sea in the
summer of =1673=. In May, a combined French and English fleet, under
Prince Rupert, fought without advantage against the Dutch. In August
Rupert was defeated off the Texel, because the French fleet, which
accompanied him, took no part in the action, Louis not wishing to
see the English masters of the sea. On this, the English nation
turned all its hatred against France.
20. =The Duke of York's Marriage and Shaftesbury's Dismissal.
1673.=--The alarm inspired by the Catholics was increased in the
course of =1673= by a marriage which took place in the Royal family.
Soon after the Restoration the Duke of York had married Clarendon's
daughter, Anne Hyde, and had by her two daughters, Mary and Anne,
both of whom were brought up as Protestants, so that, if the Duke
outlived his brother, he would, when he himself died, transmit the
crown to a Protestant queen. He was now, however, a widower, and
took as his second wife a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. If the
new Duchess should bear a son, the boy, who would inevitably be
educated as a Catholic, would be the future king of England. When
Parliament met in October it was highly indignant, and, as it
attacked the king's ministers, it was prorogued after a session of a
few days. Charles revenged himself by dismissing a minister whom the
Commons had not attacked. Shaftesbury had, earlier in the year,
learned the contents of the secret articles of the Treaty of Dover,
and had thereby discovered that Charles had made a fool of him as
completely as he had made a fool of Buckingham when he sent him to
negotiate a sham treaty (see p. 603). Shaftesbury remained true to
his policy of toleration, but it was now to be toleration for
Dissenters alone. Toleration for Catholics, he now knew, was
connected with a scheme for overthrowing English independence with
the aid of French soldiers. Accordingly, he supported the Test Act,
and, as he continued uncompliant, Charles, on November 9, dismissed
him. Shaftesbury at once threw himself into the most violent
opposition. Buckingham was dismissed not long afterwards, and the
so-called Cabal was thus finally broken up.
21. =Peace with the Dutch. 1674.=--The war with the Dutch was
brought to an end by a treaty signed on February 19, =1674=. On the
24th Charles prorogued Parliament, and did not summon it again for
more than a year. During the interval, he attempted to win friends
all round, without committing himself to any definite policy. On the
one hand, he remained on friendly terms with Louis, whilst, on the
other hand, he offered the hand of Mary, the eldest child of his
brother James, to her cousin, William of Orange. William's position
was far higher than it had been two years before. He was now at the
head of an alliance in which the Emperor Leopold, the King of Spain,
and the Duke of Lorraine combined with him to restrain the
inordinate ambition of Louis. It is true that his generalship was
less conspicuous than his diplomacy, and that in the whole course of
his life he never succeeded in beating a French army in the field.
Yet even in war his indomitable courage and conspicuous coolness
stood him in good stead, and he knew better than most commanders how
to gather his troops after a defeat and to place them in strong
positions in which the enemy did not dare to attack them. The
history of Europe during the remainder of his life was the history
of a duel between the ambitious and autocratic Louis and the
cool-headed William, the first magistrate of a republic in which his
action was checked by constitutional restraints on every side, and
the head of a coalition of which the members were always prone to
take offence and to pursue their individual interests at the
sacrifice of the common good. To win England to the alliance was,
for William, a most desirable object, but he knew that James might
very well have a son by his second marriage, and, knowing that in
that case he would reap no political advantage from a marriage with
Mary, he for the present refused the offer of her hand.[31]
[Footnote 31: Genealogy of some of the descendants of Charles I.:--
CHARLES I. = Henrietta Maria
1625-1649 |
|
+---------+-------------------------------------+
| | |
CHARLES II. Mary = William II. Anne Hyde = JAMES II. = Mary of
1660-1685 | (Prince of | (Duke of York) | Modena
| Orange) | King of Great |
| | Britain and |
| | Ireland |
| +------------+ 1685-1688 |
| | | |
WILLIAM III. = MARY ANNE Maria = James Francis
(Prince of Queen of Queen of Clementina| Edward (The
Orange) Gt. Britain Gt. Britain Sobieski | Old Pretender)
King of Gt. and Ireland and Ireland |
Britain 1689-1694 1702-1714 |
and Ireland |
1689-1702 |
+----------------------+
| |
Louisa = Charles Edward Louis Henry Benedict
Princess of Philip Casimir Marie Clement
Stolberg (The Young Pretender) (Duke of York and
Cardinal)]
CHAPTER XXXIX
DANBY'S ADMINISTRATION AND THE THREE SHORT PARLIAMENTS. 1675-1681
LEADING DATES
Reign of Charles II., 1660-1685
Rejection of the Non-Resistance Bill 1675
Marriage of William and Mary Nov. 15, 1677
The Peace of Nymwegen July 31, 1678
The Popish Plot 1678
Dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament Jan. 24, 1679
The First Short Parliament March 6--May 27, 1679
The Second Short Parliament Oct. 21, 1680--Jan. 18, 1681
The Third Short Parliament March 21--March 28, 1681
1. =Growing Influence of Danby. 1675.=--Charles's effort to govern
in his own way having ended in failure, and, in what he thought to
be of more consequence, discomfort to himself, he discovered that he
would lead an easier life if he were on good terms with his
Parliament than if he quarrelled with it. Being now disposed to
throw over whatever troublesome convictions he had imagined himself
to have, he gave his confidence to Osborne (see p. 607), whom he had
recently created Earl of Danby. Danby revived the domestic policy of
Clarendon by maintaining, in accordance with the majority of the
Cavalier Parliament, the supremacy of the Church of England over
Catholics and Dissenters, and, equally in accordance with the
majority of that Parliament, opposed Louis abroad.
2. =Parliamentary Parties. 1675.=--The decision of Charles to
support Danby in carrying out a definite policy completed the
formation of separate Parliamentary parties. These had, indeed,
existed in the Long Parliament under various names, and had
reappeared after the Restoration; but in the Cavalier Parliament the
minority in favour of toleration had, at first, been exceedingly
small, and, though it had grown larger in the days of the Cabal, it
had been distracted by distrust of Charles when he appeared as a
patron of toleration. The situation was now clear and the leaders
distinctly known. On the one side was Danby and 'No toleration,' on
the other side was Shaftesbury and 'Toleration for Dissenters
only.' Neither side shrank from base means of acquiring strength.
The ministers who formed the Cabal are said to have been the first
who bribed members of the House of Commons, but it was Danby who
reduced bribery to a system which was afterwards extended by his
successors. Shaftesbury's followers, on the other hand, were quite
ready to enter into the pay of Louis, if he would help them to
overthrow Danby and would strengthen them against the king.
[Illustration: Ordinary dress of gentlemen in 1675: from Loggan's
_Oxonia Illustrata_.]
3. =The Non-Resistance Bill. 1675.=--When Parliament met in April
=1675=, Danby produced a Bill which was intended to secure his hold
on the House of Commons, whatever might be the opinion prevailing in
the country. No one was to be allowed to hold office or to sit in
Parliament unless he would swear that he believed resistance to the
Crown to be in all cases illegal, and that he would never endeavour
to alter the government in Church or State. If the Bill had passed,
the future liberty of Parliament would have been fettered, and few,
if any, who did not approve of the existing Church system could have
entered Parliament. The Bill passed the Lords, but while it was
still under discussion in the Commons Shaftesbury stirred up so
bitter a quarrel between the Houses, that Charles prorogued
Parliament before the Bill could be converted into law.
4. =Charles a Pensionary of France. 1675-1676.=--Parliament, in its
distrust of the king, refused him supplies, upon which Charles
prorogued it for fifteen months. Louis, who feared lest Parliament
should drive Charles into joining the alliance against him, was so
pleased to see its sittings interrupted for so long a time that he
granted to Charles a pension of 100,000_l._ a year, to make him
independent of his subjects. The result was that whilst Charles
allowed Danby to have his own way in domestic affairs, he refused to
allow him to detach England from the French alliance. It was not,
however, merely his personal interests which drew him to Louis, as
he took a real interest in the prosperity of English trade, and was
unable to get over his jealousy of the Dutch. In November =1676=, he
obtained from Louis a treaty by which the French renounced a claim
made by them to seize Dutch goods conveyed in English ships, hoping
by this to gain the goodwill of Parliament at its next meeting. He
could not understand how completely the alarm of his subjects lest
their national religion and independence should be assailed by the
French had made them forgetful of their commercial jealousy of the
Dutch.
[Illustration: Cup presented, 1676, by King Charles II. to the
Barber Surgeons' Company.]
5. =Two Foreign Policies. 1677.=--On February 15, =1677=, Parliament
again met. Shaftesbury and his allies attempted to steal a march on
Danby by producing two old statutes of Edward III. which directed
that Parliaments should be held every year, founding on it an
argument that the existing Parliament, not having met for a year,
had legally ceased to exist. The House of Lords sent Shaftesbury and
three other peers to the Tower for their pains, and the Commons
contemptuously rejected a similar argument put forward in their own
House. Danby found himself triumphant. The Commons granted
600,000_l._ for increasing the navy. Danby then carried a Bill
through the House of Lords for securing the Protestant religion in
the event of a Catholic--James being, of course, intended--coming to
the throne, though the Bill did not pass the Commons, apparently
from a feeling that its provisions were insufficient. The eyes of
Englishmen were, however, principally fixed on the Continent. In the
preceding year the French had gained two great naval victories, in
one of which De Ruyter had been slain, and in the spring of =1677=
Louis carried one place after another in the Spanish Netherlands.
Both Houses now asked Charles to join the alliance against France,
whereupon Charles indignantly prorogued Parliament. When he was
urged by the Dutch ambassador to act upon the wishes of the Houses
he threw his handkerchief into the air, with the accompanying words:
"I care just that for Parliament."
6. =The Marriage of the Prince of Orange. 1677.=--Louis paid to
Charles 1,600,000_l._ for the prorogation which rid France for a
time from the danger of a war with England. Charles, however, shrank
from a renewal of the struggle with his Parliament on its next
meeting, and, though he was resolved not to go to war with France if
he could help it, he was ready to help in bringing about a general
peace which would relieve him from all further invitation to join
the allies. He accordingly welcomed Danby's suggestion that the plan
for a marriage between the Prince of Orange and James's daughter
Mary should be again taken up, especially as he hoped that it would
break down the good understanding which existed between the Prince
and Shaftesbury, and would smooth away the hostility of his subjects
to his brother's right of succession. William, knowing that the
feeling of Englishmen of both parties was in his favour, visited his
uncles, and his marriage with Mary took place on November 15,
=1677=. The marriage, which was to prove of incalculable importance
in the future, was of great significance even at the time, as it
marked the end of the hostile feeling against the Dutch which, for
so many years, had been the dominant note of English foreign
politics.
7. =Danby's Position. 1677.=--Though Danby had brought Charles round
to support his foreign as well as his domestic policy, his success
was more apparent than real. The fact was that his foreign and
domestic policies were inconsistent with one another. In the long
run it would be found impossible to contend against the French king
and the English Catholics supported by him, without calling in the
aid of those Protestant Dissenters who were most hostile to Louis.
Englishmen attached to the Church were being led by their growing
distrust of France to a tenderer feeling towards Dissenters, and the
spread of this feeling made in favour of Shaftesbury, who favoured
toleration, and not in favour of Danby, who opposed it. For the
present, however, Danby could count on the Parliamentary majority
which agreed with him, and neither he nor the king wished to risk a
dissolution.
[Illustration: Steeple of the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, London;
built by Sir Christopher Wren between 1671 and 1680.]
8. =The Peace of Nymwegen. 1678.=--When Parliament met in February
=1678=, Charles appeared full of determination. He declared that,
unless Louis agreed to make peace with the Dutch on reasonable
terms, he would go to war with France. The Commons at once resolved
to grant him 1,000,000_l._, and to support an army of 30,000 men and
a fleet of 90 ships. Before this resolution was embodied in an Act,
without which Charles could not touch the money, the followers of
Shaftesbury took alarm. They believed--and, as is now known, not
without reason--that Charles intended to use the troops to make
himself absolute. They not only pressed him to disband what troops
he had, but they entered into communication with Louis' ambassador,
in the hope that he would support them in forcing Charles to dismiss
his troops and to dissolve Parliament, some of them even accepting
from him gifts of money. Charles, on his part, vacillated, doubting
which was the best policy for him to adopt. At one time he was eager
to assist the Dutch, and sent troops to their succour in the hope
that a victorious army might afterwards be useful to him in England.
At another time he made overtures to Louis with the object of
securing his support. In the end, on July 31, Louis and the Dutch
made peace at Nymwegen without consulting Charles at all. Louis
gained Franche Comté and a large number of fortresses on his
northern frontier, which had formerly belonged to Spain. Though he
had failed to destroy the Dutch Republic, he had shown himself
superior in war to a great continental coalition, and had made
France the predominant power in Europe.
9. =The Popish Plot. 1678.=--The part played by the king left the
English people gravely dissatisfied with him. They feared lest he
should seek to overwhelm their liberties by military force and
should bring in French regiments to support his own troops. Their
suspicions were heightened by the knowledge that, if Charles died,
his brother, an uncompromising Roman Catholic, would succeed him. In
August, =1678=, a villain appeared to profit by this prevalent
distrust. Titus Oates, a liar from his youth up, who had tried
various religions and had recently professed himself a Catholic,
announced the existence of a great 'Popish plot.' Charles, he said,
was to be murdered, and James set upon the throne as the agent of
the Jesuits. A French army was to land to support him, and
Protestantism was to be absolutely suppressed. It was true that many
Catholics were anxious to see James on the throne and had expressed
contempt at Charles's conduct in refusing to declare himself one of
themselves, but the rest of Oates's story was absolutely false.
10. =Growing Excitement. 1678.=--Oates's depositions were taken
before a Middlesex magistrate, Sir Edmond Berry Godfrey. Not long
afterwards Godfrey was found murdered in the fields near Primrose
Hill. All London was wild with excitement. It was widely believed
that 'the Papists' had murdered him to punish him for listening to
Oates. It was also held to be an undoubted truth that 'the Papists'
were about to set fire to London, and to murder all good
Protestants. A joiner named College made his fortune by inventing a
pocket flail, tipped with lead, which was called the Protestant
flail, and was to be used by sober citizens to brain 'Popish'
assassins. When Parliament met on October 21 Shaftesbury, who had
been liberated early in the year, unscrupulously encouraged belief
in the supposed plot. Up to that time Catholic peers had kept their
seats in the House of Lords, and a few Catholics had surreptitiously
sat in the Commons. A new Test Act was now passed by which they were
excluded[32] from both Houses, though the Duke of York was exempted
by name from its operation. Five Catholic peers were thrown into the
Tower, and Coleman, the secretary of the Duchess of York, who had in
his custody papers implying that James had a design for forwarding
the interests of his religion, was tried and executed.
[Footnote 32: By the Test Act of 1673 offices only were closed to
the Catholics (see p. 607); the oath of supremacy, which had to be
taken by every member of the House of Commons, being held sufficient
to exclude them from that Assembly. Peers might sit in the House of
Lords without taking the oath.]
11. =Danby's Impeachment and the Dissolution of the Cavalier
Parliament. 1678-1679.=--The mark at which Shaftesbury aimed was the
overthrow of Danby. Danby had always, as far as his own opinion
went, been a warm antagonist of France, but a minister was still, in
those days, in reality the servant of the king, and was bound to
carry out his master's orders, even when they were against his own
conviction. Danby had, therefore, at the time when the Peace of
Nymwegen was under discussion, written letters to Ralph Montague,
the English ambassador in France, bidding him to ask Louis for a
considerable payment to Charles, and, at the same time, explaining
that the money was needed to make Charles independent of Parliament.
Montague, having subsequently returned to England, brought this
letter before the House of Commons. The House at once impeached
Danby, under the false impression that he had been really
subservient to France all the while. Charles had become attached to
Danby, and knew that, if the proceedings against him were carried
on, matters would come to light which he had every reason to
conceal. To save himself and his minister, on January 24, =1679=, he
dissolved the Cavalier Parliament, which had now sat for more than
seventeen years.
12. =The Meeting of the First Short Parliament. 1679.=--When the
elections to a new Parliament--the first of three short
Parliaments--were completed, Charles found that, with the exception
of at most thirty members, the opposition had gained every seat.
Bowing to the storm, he sent his brother to Brussels, and expressed
his readiness to place himself at the head of the Protestants of the
Continent. When, however, Parliament met, on March 6, =1679=, it
was found that both Houses were more anxious about the fate of
Protestantism at home than about that of Protestants abroad. The
Commons renewed the impeachment of Danby, upon which Danby produced
a free pardon from the king. The Lords decided that a pardon could
not be pleaded in bar of an impeachment, but, in the end,
proceedings against Danby were dropped on his being deprived of
office and committed to the Tower. By the advice of Sir William
Temple, Charles tried a new experiment in government. A new Privy
Council was appointed of thirty members, fifteen being ministers of
the Crown and fifteen influential lords and commoners, by the advice
of which the king was always to be guided. Shaftesbury was appointed
President of this Council, but it was soon found to be too large a
body to manage affairs which required secrecy, and a small committee
was therefore formed out of it for the consideration of all
important business.
13. =The Exclusion Bill and the Habeas Corpus Act. 1679.=--Charles,
now that he experienced the strength of the opposition, was prepared
to give way on every point except one--the maintenance of his
brother's right of succession, which the new House of Commons was
prepared to attack. He accordingly offered to place the strongest
restrictions upon the power of a Catholic king. To the House of
Commons, on the other hand, all restrictions appeared insufficient.
The members believed seriously that no law would be able to bind a
'Popish' king. They thought that if he was determined--and it was
taken for granted that he would be determined--to overthrow the
Protestant religion, he would be able to do so. Lord Russell, the
eldest son of the Duke of Bedford--the chief leader of Shaftesbury's
party in the House of Commons--was not in the habit of using
exaggerated language. Yet even he declared that, if James became
king, his subjects must make up their mind to become 'Papists' or to
be burnt. An Exclusion Bill was brought in, excluding the Duke of
York from the throne. It was read twice, but not passed, as Charles
first prorogued, and then, on May 27, dissolved Parliament. The only
Act of importance produced in this Parliament was the _Habeas Corpus
Act_, which finally put an end to sundry methods by which the Crown
had evaded the rule requiring the issue of writs of _Habeas Corpus_,
by which prisoners secured their right to be tried or liberated.
14. =Shaftesbury and the King. 1679.=--New elections were held, with
the result that a House of Commons was chosen even more bitterly
hostile to the Court than its predecessor. Shaftesbury was now at
the height of his glory. Oates and other informers were adding new
lies to those which they had told before, and the continual trials
and executions of the Catholics for participation in the supposed
Popish Plot kept the excitement in favour of the Exclusion Bill at a
fever heat. Shaftesbury's position was very similar to Pym's in
=1641=. He had on his side the fundamental principle that a nation
cannot safely be governed by a ruler whose ideas on the most
important question of the day are directly opposed to those of his
subjects, and he was right, as the result showed, in holding that,
in the seventeenth century, a Catholic king could not satisfactorily
govern a Protestant people. After Danby's fall, the king became the
real head of the party opposed to Shaftesbury. His ability had
always been great, but hitherto he had alienated those who were
disposed to be his friends by attempting to establish an absolute
government with the help of the king of France and of an army
dependent on himself. He now set himself to overthrow Shaftesbury by
appealing to a popular sentiment which was quite as strong, and
might be stronger, than the dislike of a Catholic successor; that is
to say, to the horror with which anything which threatened a new
civil war filled the hearts of his subjects.
15. =Shaftesbury and Halifax. 1679.=--Shaftesbury had already
allowed it to be known that he intended, if he carried the Exclusion
Bill, to propose that the future king should be the Duke of
Monmouth. Monmouth was the eldest of Charles's illegitimate sons,
and it was currently, though falsely, believed that Charles had been
privately married to his mother, so that he might rightly be
regarded as the heir to the Crown. Charles, who knew better than any
one else that this story was untrue, stood faithfully by his
brother, and, though his constancy made little impression as yet, he
had on his side a man whose judgment might usually be taken as an
indication of the ultimate decision of public opinion. That man was
George Savile, Earl, and afterwards Marquis of Halifax. He had been
one of the bitterest enemies of Danby, but he devoted himself to no
party. He called himself a Trimmer, as if his business was to trim
the boat, and to throw himself against each party in turn as it grew
violent in consequence of success. He now supported the king against
Shaftesbury, on the ground that it was uncertain whether James would
survive his brother, and that, if he did, he was not likely to
survive him long; whereas, the succession of the Duke of Monmouth
would not only exclude from the throne the Catholic James, but also
his daughters, who were both Protestants. As Monmouth had no real
hereditary right, there was every likelihood that, even if he
ascended the throne, his claim would be opposed by partisans of
James's eldest daughter, the Princess of Orange, and that a civil
war would ensue.
16. =The Divine Right of Kings. 1679.=--The fear of civil war
already frightened some, and would in time frighten more, into the
acceptance of a doctrine which seems very absurd now--the doctrine
of Divine indefeasible hereditary right--that is to say, that the
succession as it was established by English law was established by
Divine appointment, so that, though indeed subjects might refuse to
obey the king, if he ordered them to commit sin, it was their duty
to bear uncomplainingly any punishment that he might impose on them,
however tyrannical he might be. Such a doctrine was credited, not
because those who held it were absolutely silly, but because they
were more afraid of rebellion and civil war than they were of the
tyranny of kings. For the present, however, such ideas had little
hold on the new Parliament, and Charles prorogued it to give time
for them to grow.
17. =The Highland Host. 1677-1678.=--Events were in the meanwhile
passing in Scotland which helped to impress upon those who were
easily frightened the idea that the only security against rebellion
lay in a general submission to established institutions in Church
and State. For many years Lauderdale had been, with Charles's full
support, the absolute ruler of Scotland. He put down with a high
hand the opposition of noblemen in Parliament, but he could not put
down the religious zeal of the peasants, who, especially in the
western Lowlands, combined zeal for Presbyterianism and the Covenant
with exasperation against a Government which persecuted them. They
held meetings for prayer and preaching on the open hill-sides, and
the Government, failing to suppress these Conventicles, as they were
called, by process of law, sent into the disaffected districts, in
=1677=, a body of half-savage Highlanders known as the Highland
Host, to reduce them to obedience by plunder and outrage.
18. =Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge. 1679.=--When the Highland Host
had done its work it left behind a people whose temper was
thoroughly soured. Political hatred of the oppressors mingled with
religious zeal. The Covenanters, as those were called who denounced
episcopacy as a breach of the Covenant (see p. 525), regarded
themselves as God's chosen people and all who supported their
persecutors as the children of the devil, against whom it was
lawful to draw the sword. To many of the Scottish gentry such talk
as this appeared to be contemptible and dangerous fanaticism.
Amongst those who strove most heartily against it was an active
officer, John Graham of Claverhouse, who, being employed to quiet
the country, shot or haled to prison men whom he thought likely to
be forward in rebellion. On May 3, =1679=, a band of fanatics
murdered, on Magus Moor, near St. Andrews, James Sharp, Archbishop
of St. Andrews, who was known to be eager to call for the
persecution of the Covenanters, and who was peculiarly hated as
having been once a Presbyterian himself. On June 3 Claverhouse was
driven back at Drumclog by an armed conventicle which he attempted
to suppress. The peasants of the West rose in arms and declared
against the king's supremacy over the Church, and against Popery,
Prelacy, and the succession of the Duke of York, but on June 22,
Monmouth, who had been sent at the head of an army against them,
defeated them at Bothwell Bridge, near Hamilton, and entirely
suppressed the rebellion. Many of the prisoners were executed after
being tortured to extract from them information against their
accomplices, and this cruelty was exercised under the orders of the
Duke of York, who had been sent to Scotland as Lord High
Commissioner.[33]
[Footnote 33: Scott's _Old Mortality_ is founded on these events.]
19. =Petitioners and Abhorrers. 1680.=--Encouraged by his success in
Scotland, Charles dismissed Shaftesbury from the presidency of the
Council and got rid of his principal supporters. Temple's reformed
Council came thereby to an end. When Monmouth returned from Scotland
his father refused to see him and sent him away from London. In the
beginning of =1680= Shaftesbury's party sent up numerous petitions
to ask Charles to allow Parliament to meet, and his opponents sent
up petitions expressing abhorrence at such an attempt to force the
king's will. For a time the two parties were known as Petitioners
and Abhorrers, names which were soon replaced by those of Whigs and
Tories. These celebrated names were at first merely nicknames. The
courtiers called the Petitioners Whigs--an abbreviation of
Whigamore, the name by which the peasants of the west of Scotland
were familiarly known, from the cry of 'Whiggam' with which they
were accustomed to encourage their horses. The name Whig therefore
implied that the petitioners were no better than Covenanting rebels.
The Petitioners, on the other hand, called their opponents
Tories--the name given to brigands in Ireland, implying that they
were no better than Popish thieves.
20. =The Second Short Parliament. 1680-1681.=--Each party did all
that could be done to court popularity. Monmouth made a triumphant
progress in the west of England. On the other hand, James, on his
return from Scotland, had a good reception even in London, the
headquarters of his opponents. On June 26, =1680=, Shaftesbury
appeared at Westminster and indicted James as a recusant. At last,
on October 21, the second Short Parliament met. The Exclusion Bill
was rapidly passed through the Commons. In the Lords, Halifax
carried the House with him by an eloquent and closely-reasoned
speech, in which the claims of the Princess of Orange were dwelt on
as superior to those of Monmouth, and the Bill was, in consequence,
rejected. On December 29 Lord Stafford, a Catholic peer, was
executed on a false charge of a design to murder the king. When he
protested his innocence on the scaffold, shouts were raised of "God
bless you, my lord! We believe you, my lord!" Charles saw in these
shouts an indication that the tide of opinion was turning in his
favour, and, on January 18, =1681=, dissolved Parliament.
21. =The Third Short Parliament. 1681.=--Charles summoned a new
Parliament to meet at Oxford, where it would not be exposed to any
violent interruption by Shaftesbury's 'brisk boys'--as his noisy
London supporters were called--who might, it was feared, repeat the
exploits of the City mob in =1641= (see p. 535). The new House of
Commons was again predominantly Whig, and it was thought by the
Whigs that Oxford had been selected as the place of meeting because
the University was eminently Tory, with the deliberate intention of
overpowering them by force. Their alarm increased when they learned
that the king was bringing his guards with him. Accordingly the
Whigs armed themselves and their servants in self-defence, and, in
this guise, rode into Oxford. Parliament was opened on March 21,
=1681=, and Charles then offered to assent to any scheme for
stripping his brother of royal authority, if only he were recognised
as king. Shaftesbury replied that the only way of ending the dispute
was to declare Monmouth heir to the Crown. As the Commons supported
Shaftesbury, Charles, on March 28, dissolved his third Short
Parliament. So much was he afraid that the Whig members and their
servants might lay violent hands on him, that he drove in one coach
to Christchurch Hall, where the House of Lords was sitting, and sent
his robes by another, in order that it might not be guessed that a
dissolution was intended. He soon found that he could now count on
popular support in almost every part of England. The mass of people
judge more by what they see than by what they hear. The pistols in
the hands of the Whig members when they rode into Oxford had driven
into men's heads the belief that they intended to gain their ends by
civil war, and, much as the nation disliked the idea of having a
'Popish' king, it disliked the idea of civil war still more, and
rallied round the king.
CHAPTER XL
THE LAST YEARS OF CHARLES II. 1681-1685
LEADING DATES
Reign of Charles II., 1660-1685
Tory Reaction 1681
Flight of Shaftesbury 1682
Forfeiture of the Charter of the City of London 1683
The Rye House Plot 1683
Executions of Russell and Sidney 1683
Death of Charles II. Feb. 6, 1685
1. =Tory Reaction. 1681.=--The Tory reaction which followed made
itself especially felt in the law-courts. Judges and juries who had
combined to send to death innocent Catholics, upon the testimony of
forsworn informers, now combined to send to death ardent Whigs, upon
the testimony of informers equally base. College, the inventor of
the Protestant flail (see p. 615), was condemned to death, as having
borne arms in Oxford during the last Parliament, and others shared
his fate on equally slight grounds. In the City of London, however,
it was still impossible to secure a verdict against a Whig. Juries
were everywhere nominated by the sheriff of the county, and sheriffs
were, in political cases, ready to compose a jury of political
partisans. In every part of England except Middlesex, the sheriffs
were named by the king, and were, therefore, Tories. The City of
London, which was strongly Whig, had the privilege of electing
sheriffs for London and Middlesex, and these sheriffs took care that
Middlesex juries should be composed of Whigs. Shaftesbury was
accused of high treason, but before he could be tried the Grand Jury
of Middlesex had to find a true bill against him--that is to say, to
declare that there was sufficient evidence against him to call for a
trial. On November 24, =1681=, the Grand Jury, composed of his own
political partisans, threw out the bill, and he was at once set at
liberty.
2. ='Absolom and Achitophel.' 1681.=--A few days before
Shaftesbury's release, Dryden, the greatest living master of the
heroic couplet, strove to stir up men's minds against the prisoner
by his satire of 'Absolom and Achitophel,' in which the part of the
tempter Achitophel was assigned to Shaftesbury and the part of the
tempted Absolom to Monmouth. Shaftesbury was described as
For close designs and crooked councils fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which worketh out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity;
Pleased with the danger when the waves ran high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to show his wit.
3. =The Scottish Test Act and the Duke of York's Return.
1681-1682.=--The 'daring pilot's' course was nearly run. Before
long, on May 27, =1682=, Shaftesbury's most conspicuous enemy, the
Duke of York, returned from Scotland. Whilst he was in Scotland he
had obtained an Act from the Scottish Parliament, binding on all
officials a new test, requiring them to swear to the doctrine of
hereditary right and to the maintenance of the episcopal Church. The
Earl of Argyle, the son of the Marquis of Argyle, the political
leader of the Covenanters against Charles I., having inherited his
father's Presbyterianism, not only refused the oath, but gave
reasons for refusing. The Crown lawyers declared that his reasons
poisoned the minds of the subjects against the king, and he was
tried and condemned to death under an old statute against
leasing-making--literally, the making of lies--which had been passed
about a century before to punish court favourites who sowed
dissension between the king and his people by poisoning the mind of
the king against his subjects. Argyle, however, escaped to Holland,
and on April 20, =1682=, James reached London.
4. =The City Elections. 1682.=--The first thing on which, after
James's return, the king's ministers set their heart, was to strike
a blow at Shaftesbury. As he lived in his house in Aldersgate Street
and took care never to leave the City, it was impossible to bring
him to trial as long as the sheriffs of London and Middlesex were
Whigs. The Lord Mayor, Moore, was gained by the Court, and, by
various unscrupulous contrivances, he secured the appointment of two
Tory sheriffs, and, even before the end of =1682=, of a Tory Lord
Mayor named Prichard as his own successor. There would no longer be
any difficulty in filling the Middlesex jury box with Tories.
5. =Flight and Death of Shaftesbury. 1682-1683.=--Shaftesbury had
for some time been keenly alive to the danger impending over him. He
had wild followers in the City ready to follow him in acts of
violence, and he had proposed to Russell and Monmouth that the
king's guards at Whitehall should be attacked, and the king
compelled to do his bidding. Russell and Monmouth recoiled from an
act of violence which would certainly end in bloodshed. Shaftesbury
still hoped to effect his end by the aid of his less scrupulous
supporters; but time slipped away, and on October 19, three days
before Prichard's election, he fled to Holland, where he died on
January 22, =1683=. With all his faults, he had led the way on that
path in which the English nation was, before long, to walk, as he
had latterly striven for a combination of Parliamentary supremacy
with toleration for dissenters and without toleration for Catholics.
His personal failure was due to the disquietude caused by his
turbulence in the minds of that large part of the community which
regards orderly government as a matter of primary necessity.
6. =The Attack on the City. 1682-1683.=--The difficulty which
Charles had experienced in bending the city to his will made him
anxious to provide against similar resistance in the future. Taking
care to effect his objects under, at least, the form of law, he
enforced on the electors in the City, who were called in December to
choose the Common Council, the oath of supremacy and the proof
required by the Corporation Act of having received the Sacrament in
the Church. The result was that a Tory majority was returned on the
Common Council. Following up this blow in =1683=, he called on the
City to show cause, by a writ known as '_Quo Warranto_,' before the
King's Bench, why its charter should not be forfeited, in
consequence of its having imposed irregular tolls and having
attacked the king's authority in a petition exhibited in =1680=. The
King's Bench decided against the City, and the king then offered to
restore the charter on certain conditions, of which the principal
was, that he was to have a veto on the election of its principal
officers. At first the City accepted his terms, but, before the end
of the year, it drew back, and the king then named the Lord Mayor
and other officers directly, paying no further regard to the
municipal self-government under which the City had, for many
centuries, conducted its own affairs.
7. =The Remodelling of the Corporations. 1683-1684.=--A large
number of other corporate towns were treated as London had been
treated. By a plentiful use of writs of _Quo Warranto_, the judges
on circuit obtained the surrender of their charters, after which the
king issued new ones in which Tories alone were named as members of
the corporations. It was said of Jeffreys, one amongst the judges
who was most subservient, that he 'made all charters, like the walls
of Jericho, fall down before him.' The object of these proceedings
was to make sure of a Tory Parliament when the time came for fresh
elections. In a large number of boroughs the corporations chose the
members, and in such cases wherever the corporation had been
remodelled, there would be a safe Tory seat. At the same time the
laws against the Dissenters were strictly executed, and the prisons
filled with their ministers.
8. =The Rye House Plot. 1683.=--When injustice is done under legal
forms, there are usually some persons who think it allowable to
appeal to force. Some of Shaftesbury's more violent followers formed
a plot to attack the king and his brother at the Rye House on their
return from Newmarket, and either to seize or murder them. The plot
failed, as Charles passed the Rye House some days earlier than was
expected, and several of the conspirators were taken and executed.
9. =The Whig Combination. 1683.=--The discovery of the Rye House
Plot brought to light a dangerous combination amongst the
Parliamentary Whigs, in which Monmouth, Russell, Essex, Lord Howard
of Escrick, and other notable persons were implicated. They had,
indeed, kept themselves free from any intention to offer personal
violence to the king, but they had attempted to form an association
strong enough to compel him to summon another Parliament, though
apparently without coming to a definite conclusion as to the way in
which they were to use compulsion. In their own eyes their project
was no more than constitutional agitation. In the eyes of the king
and of the Crown lawyers it was a preparation for rebellion. Essex
committed suicide in prison, whilst Howard of Escrick turned
informer against his friends.
10. =Trial and Execution of Lord Russell. 1683.=--Russell was
accordingly put on his trial as a traitor. In those days no one on
his trial for treason was allowed to be defended by a lawyer, as far
as the facts of the case were concerned, but no objection was taken
to his having some one near him to take notes of the evidence and to
assist his memory. "Your friends," wrote his wife to him shortly
before the trial, "believing I can do you some service at your
trial, I am extremely willing to try. My resolution will hold out,
pray let yours." Her offer was accepted, and she gave her husband
all the help that it was possible to give. The jury, however,
brought in a verdict of guilty, and sentence of death followed. In
prison Russell was visited by two ministers, Tillotson and Burnet.
No clergymen in England were more liberal-minded than these two, yet
they urged the prisoner to acknowledge that resistance to the king
was in all cases unlawful. Russell maintained that, in extreme
cases, subjects might resist. Here lay the root of the political
animosity between Whig and Tory. Whether an extreme case had
occurred was a matter of opinion. "As for the share I had in the
prosecution of the Popish Plot," Russell declared on the scaffold,
"I take God to witness that I proceeded in it in the sincerity of my
heart, being then really convinced, as I am still, that there was a
conspiracy against the king, the nation, and the Protestant
religion." It was because the nation at large no longer held this to
be true that the Tories were in power.
11. =Execution of Algernon Sidney. 1683.=--Russell's trial was
followed by that of Algernon Sidney. Though the real charge against
him was that of having conspired against the king, only one, and
that a not very credible, witness could be produced as evidence of
this; and the prosecuting lawyers then brought forward a treatise,
written in his own hand, but neither printed nor circulated in
manuscript, in which he had advocated the right of subjects to
depose their king. This was held to be equivalent to having a second
witness against him, and Sidney was condemned and executed. He was a
theoretical Republican, and it was hard to bring up against him a
writing which he had never published. Other less important Whigs
were also put to death. Monmouth owed his pardon to his father's
tenderness, but, as he still continued to bear himself as the head
of a party, he was sent into honourable exile in Holland.
12. =Parties at Court. 1684.=--In the spring of =1684= three years
had passed without a Parliament, although the statute repealing the
Triennial Act (see p. 588) had declared that Parliament ought to be
summoned every three years. So sure was Charles of his ground that
he liberated Danby without causing a murmur of complaint. At Court
there were two parties, one led by Halifax, which urged that, by
summoning a Parliament now, Charles would not only comply with the
law, but would have a Parliament as loyal as the Cavalier Parliament
had been; the other, led by Lawrence Hyde, the second son of
Clarendon, who had recently been created Earl of Rochester.
Rochester, who was the highest of Tories, pointed out that the law
prescribed no means by which the king could be compelled to call a
Parliament if he did not wish to do so, and that, after all, the
Cavalier Parliament, loyal as it was at first, had made itself very
disagreeable to the king during the latter years of its existence.
All through the year Charles hesitated and left the question
undecided. The king of France, who was renewing his aggressions on
the Continent under the guise of legal claims, was ready to do all
he could to prevent the meeting of an English Parliament, which
would, in all probability, declare against him, and by sending money
to Charles from time to time, he saved him from the necessity of
asking his subjects for support.
13. =Death of Charles II. 1685.=--On February 2, =1685=, before
anything had been decided, Charles was struck down by an apoplectic
stroke. It was soon known that he was dying. Sancroft, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke plainly to him: "It is time," he
said, "to speak out; for, sir, you are about to appear before a
Judge who is no respecter of persons." The king took no notice, and,
after a while, the Duke of York came to his bed-side and asked his
brother whether he wished to be reconciled to the Church of Rome.
"Yes," murmured the dying man, "with all my heart!" James sent for a
priest, directing the bishops and the courtiers to leave the room.
Charles was duly reconciled, receiving absolution and the sacraments
of the Roman Church. He lingered for some days, and begged pardon of
those around him. He had been, he said, an unconscionable time in
dying, but he hoped they would excuse it. On February 6 he died.
14. =Constitutional Progress. 1660-1685.=--The twenty-five years of
the reign of Charles II. were years of substantial constitutional
progress. Charles did not, indeed, acknowledge that Parliament had
that right of directing the choice of his ministers which the Long
Parliament had upheld against his father in the Grand Remonstrance;
but though he took care that his ministers should be responsible to
himself and not to Parliament, he had also taken care, on the whole,
to adapt the selection of his ministers to the changing temper of
Parliament and the nation. Clarendon, the Cabal, and Danby had all
been allowed to disappear from office when Parliament turned against
them. The formation of Parliamentary parties, again, was itself a
condition of Parliamentary strength. The Cavalier Parliament had
been weakened in its later years by the uncertainty of its aims. At
one time the king's reliance upon France and his tendency to rest
his government on armed force provoked a majority to vote against
him. At another time some concession made by him to their wishes
brought round a majority to his side. In the latter years of
Charles's reign this uncertainty was at an end. Charles had thrown
his dependence on France and the army into the background, and in a
struggle, the successful issue of which would bring no personal
advantage to himself, had taken his stand on the intelligible
principle of defending his brother's succession. He had consequently
rallied round the throne all who thought the maintenance of order to
be of supreme importance, whilst all who suspected that the order
which Charles maintained was hurtful and oppressive combined against
him. This sharp division of parties ultimately strengthened the
power of Parliament. The intemperance of Charles's adversaries had
indeed given him the upper hand for the time, but, if ever the day
came when a king made himself unpopular, a Parliament opposed to him
would be all the stronger if its majority were of one mind in
supporting definite principles under definite leaders. Charles II.,
in short, did not live to see the establishment of Parliamentary
government, but he unwittingly prepared the way for it.
[Illustration: Dress of ladies of quality: from Sandford's
_Coronation Procession of James II._]
[Illustration: Ordinary attire of women of the lower classes: from
Sandford's _Coronation Procession of James II._]
15. =Prosperity of the Country.=--The horror of a renewal of civil
war, which was partly the result of sad experience, was also the
result of the growth of the general well-being of the community. The
population of England now exceeded 5,000,000. Rents were rising, and
commerce was rapidly on the increase. Fresh colonies--amongst them
Pennsylvania and Carolina--were founded in America. In England
itself the growth of London was an index to the general prosperity.
In those days the City was the home of the merchants, who did not
then leave the place where their business was done to spend the
evening and night in the suburbs. Living side by side, they clung to
one another, and their civic ardour created a strength which weighed
heavily in the balance of parties. The opposition of the City to
Charles I. had given the victory to Parliament in the civil war, and
its dislike of military government had done much to bring about the
Restoration. The favour of the City had been the chief support of
Shaftesbury, and it was only by overthrowing its municipal
institutions that Charles II. had succeeded in crippling its power
to injure him. In the meantime a new forest of houses was springing
up on sites between Lincoln's Inn and what is now known as Soho
Square, and round St. James's Church. The Court and the frequent
meetings of Parliament attracted to London many families which, a
generation earlier, would have lived entirely in the country.
[Illustration: Coach of the latter half of the seventeenth century:
from Loggan's _Oxonia Illustrata_.]
[Illustration: Wagon of the second half of the seventeenth century:
from Loggan's _Oxonia Illustrata_.]
16. =The Coffee Houses.=--Nothing has made a greater change in the
material habits of Europeans than the introduction of warm
beverages. Chocolate first made its way into England in the time of
the Commonwealth, but it was for some time regarded merely as a
medicine, not to be taken by the prudent except under a physician's
orders, though those interested in its sale declared that it was
suitable for all, and would cure every possible complaint. Chocolate
was soon followed by coffee, and coffee soon became fashionable, not
as a medicine, but as a pleasant substitute for beer and wine. The
introduction of tea was somewhat later. It was in the reign of
Charles II. that coffee-houses arose in London, and became places of
resort, answering the purposes of the modern clubs. They soon
acquired political importance, matters of state being often
discussed in them, and the opinion of their frequenters carrying
weight with those who were directly concerned with Government. The
gathering of men of intellectual prominence to London was a marked
feature of the time, and, except at the universities, there was
scarcely a preacher or a theological writer of note who was not to
be found either in the episcopate or at the head of a London parish.
[Illustration: Reaping and harvesting in the second half of the
seventeenth century; Cambridge in the distance: from Loggan's
_Cantabrigia Illustrata_.]
17. =Condition of London.=--The arrangements for cleanliness did not
keep pace in London with the increased magnificence of the
dwellings. The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields, for instance, was a
place where rubbish was shot, and where beggars congregated. St.
James's Square was just as bad, whilst filthy and discoloured
streams poured along the gutters, and carts and carriages splashed
mud and worse than mud over the passengers on foot. At the beginning
of the reign of Charles II. the streets were left in darkness, and
robbers made an easy prey of those who ventured out after dark.
Young noblemen and gentlemen when drunk took pleasure in knocking
down men and insulting women. These were they of whom Milton was
thinking when he declared that
In luxurious cities, when the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury, and outrage: and when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
Something was, however, done before the end of the reign to mitigate
the dangers arising from darkness. One man obtained a patent for
lighting London, and it was thought a great thing that he placed a
lantern in front of one door in every ten in winter only, between
six and midnight.
18. =Painting.=--The art of the time, so far as painting was
concerned, was entirely in the hands of foreigners. Van Dyck, a
Fleming, from Antwerp, had left to the world numerous representations
of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, of Strafford and Laud, and of the
ladies and gentlemen who thronged the Court. An Englishman, Samuel
Cooper, made posterity acquainted with the features of Cromwell (see
p. 567). Charles II. again called in the services of a foreigner,
whose real name was Van der Goes, but who called himself Lely, because
his father's house on the borders of Germany and the Netherlands was
known by the sign of the Lily. Lely painted Court beauties and Court
gentlemen. He had far less power than Van Dyck of presenting on canvas
the mind which lies behind the features, and in many cases those who
sat to him had minds less worthy of being presented than those with
which Van Dyck had to do. When Charles II. wished for a painting of
the sea and of shipping he had to send for a Dutch painter,
Vandevelde; whilst an Italian, Verrio, decorated his ceilings with
subjects taken from heathen mythology.
19. =Architecture.=--In architecture alone English hands were found
to do the work required; but the style in which they built was not
English but Italian. The rows of pillars and round arches, with the
meaningless decorations which bespoke an age preferring
sumptuousness to beauty, superseded the quaint Elizabethan and early
Jacobean houses, which seemed built for comfort rather than for
display, such as Ingestre Hall (see p. 471) and Hatfield House (see
p. 485). In the reign of James I., Inigo Jones planned the great
banqueting hall at Whitehall (see p. 493), and so contemptuous was
he of the great architecture of the middle ages, that he fitted on
an Italian portico to the west front of the old St. Paul's. This
style of building culminated in the work of Sir Christopher Wren.
The fire of London gave him an opportunity which he did not throw
away. The steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow is an example of his powers of
design (see p. 614), but his greatest achievement, the new St.
Paul's, was, when Charles II. died, only slowly rising from the
ground, and it remained uncompleted till long after Charles II. had
been laid in the grave.
20. =Science.=--The foundation of the Royal Society (see p. 598) had
borne ample fruit. Halley and Flamsteed were the astronomers of the
time till their fame was eclipsed by that of Isaac Newton, who
before the end of the reign of Charles II. was already meditating on
the views contained in his 'Principia,' in which the law of
gravitation was set forth, though that work was not written till
after the death of that king.
[Illustration: Costume of a gentleman: from Sandford's _Coronation
Procession of James II._]
21. =Difficulties of Communication.=--Difficulties of communication
served both to encourage town life and to hinder the increase of
manufactures at any considerable distance from the sea. The roads
were left to each parish to repair, and the parishes usually did as
little as possible. In many places a mere quagmire took the place of
the road. Young and active men, and sometimes ladies, travelled on
horseback, and goods of no great weight were transmitted on
packhorses. The family coach, in which those who were too dignified
or too weak to ride made their way from one part of the country to
another, was dragged by six horses, and often sank so deeply in the
mud as only to be extricated by the loan of additional plough horses
from a neighbouring farm, whilst heavy goods were conveyed in
lumbering waggons, still more difficult to move even at a moderate
speed. For passengers who could not afford to keep a coach the
carrier's waggon served as a slow conveyance; but before the end of
the reign of Charles II. there had been introduced a vehicle known
as The Flying Coach, which managed to perform a journey at the rate
of fifty miles a day in summer and thirty in winter, in districts in
which roads were exceptionably good.
22. =The Country Gentry and the Country Clergy.=--These difficulties
of communication greatly affected the less wealthy of the country
gentry and the country clergy. A country gentleman of large fortune,
indeed, would occasionally visit London and appear as a visitor at
the house of some relative or friend to whom he was specially
attached. The movements, however, even of this class were much
restricted, whilst men of moderate estate seldom moved at all. The
refinements which at present adorn country life were not then to be
found. Books were few, and the man of comparatively slender means
found sufficient occupation in the management of his land and in the
enjoyment of field sports. His ideas on politics were crude, and,
because they were crude, were pertinaciously held. The country
clergyman was relatively poorer than the country squire; and had few
means of cultivating his mind or of elevating the religion of his
parishioners. The ladies of the houses of even the richest of the
landed gentry were scarcely educated at all, and, though there were
bright exceptions, any one familiar with the correspondence of the
seventeenth century knows that, if he comes across a letter
particularly illegible and uninteresting, there is a strong
probability that the writer was a woman.
23. =Alliance between the Gentry and the Church.=--A common life
passed in the country under much the same conditions naturally drew
together the squire and the rector or vicar of his parish. A still
stronger bond united them for the most part in a common Toryism.
They had both suffered from the same oppression: the squire, or his
predecessor, had been heavily fined by a Puritan Parliament or a
Puritan Lord Protector, whilst the incumbent or his predecessor had
been expelled from his parsonage and deprived of his livelihood by
the same authority. They therefore naturally combined in thinking
that the first axiom in politics was to keep Dissenters down, lest
they should do again what men like-minded with themselves had done
before. Unless some other fear, stronger still, presented itself to
them, they would endure almost anything from the king rather than
risk the return to power of the Dissenters or of the Whigs, the
friends of the Dissenters.
CHAPTER XLI
JAMES II. 1685-1689
LEADING DATES
Accession of James II. Feb. 6, 1685
Meeting of Parliament May 19, 1685
Battle of Sedgemoor July 6, 1685
Prorogation of Parliament Nov. 20, 1685
The Judges allow the King's Dispensing Power June 21, 1686
First Declaration of Indulgence April 4, 1687
Second Declaration of Indulgence April 22, 1688
Birth of the Son of James II. June 10, 1688
Acquittal of the Seven Bishops June 30, 1688
Landing of William of Orange Nov. 5, 1688
The Crown accepted by William and Mary Feb. 13, 1689
1. =The Accession of James II. 1685.=--The character of the new
king, James II., resembled that of his father. He had the same
unalterable belief that whatever he wished to do was absolutely
right; the same incapacity for entering into the feelings or motives
of his opponents, and even more than his father's inability to see
faults in those who took his side. He was bent on procuring
religious liberty for the Catholics, and at first imagined it
possible to do this with the help of the clergy and laity of the
Church of England. In his first speech to the Privy Council he
announced his intention of preserving the established government in
Church and State. He had mass, indeed, celebrated with open doors in
his chapel at Whitehall, and he continued to levy taxes which had
been granted to his brother for life only; yet, as he issued writs
for a Parliament, these things did not count much against him.
Unless, indeed, he was to set the law and constitution at defiance
he could do no otherwise than summon Parliament, as out of
1,400,000_l._ which formed the revenue of the Crown, 900,000_l._
lapsed on Charles's death. James, however, secured himself against
all eventualities by procuring from Louis a promise of financial aid
in case of Parliament's proving restive. Before Parliament met, the
king's inclinations were manifested by sentences pronounced by
judges eager to gain his favour. On the one hand, Titus Oates was
subjected to a flogging so severe that it would have killed anyone
less hardy than himself. On the other hand, Richard Baxter, the most
learned and moderate of Dissenters, was sent to prison after being
scolded and insulted by Jeffreys, who, at the end of the late reign,
had, through James's influence, been made Chief Justice of the
King's Bench.
[Illustration: James II.: from the National Portrait Gallery.]
2. =A Tory Parliament. 1685.=--Parliament met on May 19. The House
of Commons was Tory by an enormous majority, partly because the
remodelled corporations (see p. 625) returned Tory members, but
still more because the feeling of the country ran strongly in
James's favour. The Commons granted to him the full revenue which
had been enjoyed by his brother, and refused to listen to a few of
its members who raised objections to some things which had been
recently done. The House had not been long in session when it heard
of two invasions, the one in Scotland and the other in England.
[Illustration: Yeomen of the Guard: from Sandford's _Coronation
Procession of James II._]
3. =Argyle's Landing. 1685.=--In Scotland the upper classes were
animated by a savage resolve to keep no terms with the Covenanters,
whose fanatical violence alarmed them. The Scottish Parliament, soon
after the accession of James, passed a law punishing with death any
one attending a conventicle. Argyle, believing, in his exile in
Holland, that all honest Scots would be ready to join him against
the tyranny of the Government, sailed early in May at the head of a
small expedition, and arrived in the Firth of Clyde. He had himself
no military skill, and his followers, no less ignorant than himself,
overruled everything that he proposed. Soon after landing he was
captured and carried to Edinburgh, where, as he was already legally
condemned to death (see p. 623), he was executed on June 30 without
further trial. On the night before his death a member of the Council
came to see him in his cell, where he found him in a placid slumber.
The visitor rushed off in agony to the house of a friend. "I have
been," he said, "in Argyle's prison. I have seen him within an hour
of eternity, sleeping as sweetly as ever man did. But as for me--"
His voice failed him, and he could say no more.
4. =Monmouth's Landing. 1685.=--In the meanwhile Monmouth, the
champion of the Dissenters and extreme Protestants, had, on June 11,
landed at Lyme. So popular was he in the west of England that the
trained bands could not be trusted to oppose him, and he was left
unassailed till regiments of the regular army could be brought
against him. The peasants and townsmen of the western counties
flocked to join Monmouth, and he entered Taunton at the head of
5,000 men; but not a single country gentleman gave him his support.
Parliament passed against him an Act of Attainder, condemning him to
death without further trial, and the king marched in person against
him at the head of a disciplined force. Monmouth declared himself to
be the legitimate king, and, his name being James, he was popularly
known amongst his followers as King Monmouth, in order to prevent
confusion. He advanced as far as Philip's Norton: there, hopeless of
gaining support amongst the governing classes, he fell back on
Bridgwater. The king followed him with 2,500 regular troops, and
1,500 from the Wiltshire trained bands. Monmouth was soldier enough
to know that, with his raw recruits, his only chance lay in
surprising the enemy. The king's army lay on Sedgemoor, and
Monmouth, in the early morning of July 6, attempted to fall on the
enemy unawares. Broad ditches filled with water checked his course,
and the sun was up before he reached his goal. It was inevitable
that he should be beaten; the only wonder was that his untrained men
fought so long as they did. Monmouth himself fled to the New Forest,
where he was captured and brought to London. James admitted him to
his presence, but refused to pardon him. On July 15 he was executed
as an attainted traitor without further trial.
5. =The Bloody Assizes. 1685.=--Large numbers of Monmouth's
followers were hanged by the pursuing soldiers without form of law.
Many were thrust into prison to await their trial. Jeffreys, the
most insolent of the judges, was sent to hold, in the western
counties, what will always be known as the Bloody Assizes. It is
true that the law which he had to administer was cruel, but Jeffreys
gained peculiar obloquy by delighting in its cruelty, and by
sneering at its unhappy victims. At Winchester he condemned to death
an old lady, Alice Lisle, who was guilty of hiding in her house two
fugitives from vengeance. At Dorchester 74 persons were hanged. In
Somersetshire no less than 233 were put to death. Jeffreys
overwhelmed his victims with scornful mockery. One of them pleaded
that he was a good Protestant: "Protestant!" cried Jeffreys, "you
mean Presbyterian; I'll hold you a wager of it, I can smell a
Presbyterian forty miles." Some one tried to move his compassion in
favour of one of the accused. "My lord," he said, "this poor
creature is on the parish." "Do not trouble yourselves," was the
only answer given, "I will ease the parish of the burden," and he
ordered the man to be hanged at once. The whole number of those who
perished in the Bloody Assizes was 320, whilst 841 were transported
to the West Indies to work as slaves under a broiling sun. James
welcomed Jeffreys on his return, and made him Lord Chancellor as a
reward for his achievements.
6. =The Violation of the Test Act. 1685.=--James's success made him
believe that he could overpower any opposition. He had already
increased his army and had appointed officers who had refused to
take the test. On his return to London he resolved to ask Parliament
to repeal the Test Act, and dismissed Halifax for refusing to
support his proposal. It would probably have been difficult for him
to obtain the repeal even of the Recusancy Laws which punished
Catholics for acting on their religious belief. It was not only
hopeless, but rightly hopeless, for him to ask for a repeal of the
Test Act, which, as long as a Catholic king was on the throne, stood
in the way of his filling all posts in the army as well as in the
state with men who would be ready to assist him in designs against
the religion and liberties of Englishmen. If anything could increase
the dislike of the nation to the repeal of the Test Act it was the
fact that, in that very year, Louis had revoked the Edict of Nantes
issued by his ancestor, Henry IV., to protect the French
Protestants, and had handed them over to a cruel persecution. It
might be fairly argued that what Louis had done, James, if he got
the power, might be expected to do hereafter.
7. =Breach between Parliament and King. 1685.=--When the Houses,
which had adjourned when the king went into the West, met again on
November 9, James informed them not only that he had appointed
officers disqualified by law, but that he was determined not to part
with them. The House of Commons, the most loyal House that had ever
been chosen, remonstrated with him, and there were signs that the
Lords intended to support the remonstrance. On November 20 James
prorogued Parliament.
8. =The Dispensing Power. 1686.=--Like his father, James liked to
think that, when he broke the laws, he was acting legally, and he
remembered that the Crown had, in former days, exercised a power of
dispensing with the execution of the laws (see p. 604). This power
had, indeed, been questioned by the Parliament in =1673= (see p.
606), but there was no statute or legal judgment declaring it to be
forbidden by law. James now wanted to get a decision from the judges
that he possessed the dispensing power, and when he found that four
of the judges disagreed with him, he replaced them by four judges
who would decide in his favour. Having thus packed the Bench, he
procured the bringing of a collusive action against Sir Edward
Hales, who, having been appointed an officer in the army, had, as a
Catholic, refused to take the test. Hales produced a dispensation
from the king, and, on June 21, =1686=, the judges decided that such
dispensations freed those who received them from the penalties
imposed by any laws whatever.
9. =The Ecclesiastical Commission. 1686=.--James, in virtue of his
dispensing power, had already authorised some clergymen of the
Church of England, who had turned Roman Catholics, to retain their
benefices. Obadiah Walker, the Master of University College, Oxford,
became a Roman Catholic, set up a press for the printing of Roman
Catholic tracts, and had mass celebrated openly in the college. Yet
he was allowed to retain his post. Then the king appointed Massey,
an avowed Roman Catholic, to the Deanery of Christchurch, and
Parker, a secret Roman Catholic, to the Bishopric of Oxford.
Naturally the clergy who retained the principles of the Church of
England preached sermons warning their hearers against the errors of
the Church of Rome. James ordered them to be silent, and directed
Compton, Bishop of London, to suspend Sharp, the Dean of Norwich,
for preaching against the Papal doctrines. As Compton refused to
obey, James, on July 11, constituted an Ecclesiastical Commission
Court, at the head of which was Jeffreys. It is true that the Court
of High Commission had been abolished by a statute of the Long
Parliament, but James argued that his father's court, having power
to punish the laity as well as the clergy, could be abolished by Act
of Parliament, whereas, a king being supreme governor of the Church,
might provide for the punishment of the clergy alone, in any way
that he thought fit, without taking account of Acts of Parliament.
The first act of the new court was to suspend Compton for his
refusal to suspend Sharp. James therefore had it in his power to
stop the mouths of all the religious teachers in the realm.
10. =Scotland and Ireland. 1686-1687.=--In Scotland James insisted
on a Parliamentary repeal of all laws imposing penalties on Roman
Catholics. The Scottish Parliament, subservient as it had been to
Charles II., having refused to comply with this demand, James
dispensed with all these laws by his own authority, thereby making
Scottish Episcopalians almost as sullen as Scottish Covenanters. In
Ireland James had on his side the whole Catholic Celtic population,
which complained of wrongs committed against their religion and
property by the English colonists. James determined to redress these
wrongs. In February, =1687=, he sent over to Ireland as Lord Deputy
the Earl of Tyrconnel, whose character was low, and who had been
known at Charles's Court as Lying Dick Talbot. He was, however, a
Roman Catholic, and would carry out the king's will in Ireland
without remorse.
11. =The Fall of the Hydes. 1686-1687.=--To make way for Tyrconnel,
the former lord-lieutenant, Clarendon, the eldest son of the late
Chancellor, was recalled from Ireland, his fall being preceded by
that of his younger brother Rochester (see p. 627). Rochester was
devoted to the maintenance of the Royal power; but James told him
that he must change his religion if he wished to keep his office,
and on his refusal he was dismissed.
12. =The Declaration of Indulgence. 1687.=--The dismissal of
Rochester was the strongest possible evidence that James's own
spirit was intolerant. Yet he was driven, by the course which he had
taken, into the adoption of the principle of toleration, and no
doubt persuaded himself that he accepted toleration on its own
merits. At first he had hoped to obtain favours for the Roman
Catholics with the goodwill of the Church of England, whilst
continuing the persecution of Dissenters. He now knew that this was
impossible, and he therefore resolved to make friends of the
Dissenters by pronouncing for a general toleration. He first had
private interviews with the leading men in both Houses, in the hope
that they would, if Parliament were re-assembled, assist in the
repeal of all penal laws bearing on religion. These closetings, as
they were called,[34] proving ineffectual, he issued, by his own
authority, on April 4, =1687=, a Declaration of Indulgence,
suspending all laws against Roman Catholics and Dissenters alike,
and giving permission to both to worship publicly. The result of the
Declaration was not all that James desired. Many of the Dissenters,
indeed, accepted their freedom joyfully. Most of them, however,
dreaded a gift which seemed only intended to elevate the Roman
Catholics, and opened their ears to the pleadings of the Churchmen,
who now assured their old enemies that if they would have a little
patience they should, in the next Parliament, have a toleration
secured by law. This, argued the Churchmen, would be of far more use
to them than one granted by the king, which would avail them nothing
whenever the king died and was succeeded by his Protestant daughter,
the Princess of Orange.
[Footnote 34: Because the interviews took place in the king's
closet, or private room.]
13. =The Expulsion of the Fellows of Magdalen. 1687.=--Scarcely was
the Declaration issued when James showed how little he cared for law
or custom. There was a vacancy in the President-ship of Magdalen
College, Oxford, and James commanded the Fellows to choose one
Farmer, a man of bad character, and a Roman Catholic. On April 15
the Fellows, as they had the undoubted right to do, chose Hough. In
June they were summoned before the Ecclesiastical Commission, which
declared Hough's election to be void, and ordered them to choose
Parker, who, though at heart a Roman Catholic, was nominally the
Protestant Bishop of Oxford (see p. 638). They answered simply that,
as Hough had been lawfully elected, they had no right to choose
another President in his lifetime. Jeffreys bullied them in vain.
James insisted on their accepting Parker, and on acknowledging the
legality of the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Commission. All
but two, having refused to submit, were turned out of the College
and left to beg their bread. When the Commissioners attempted to
install Parker in his office not a blacksmith in Oxford would
consent to break open the lock of the President's lodgings. The
servants of the Commissioners were at last employed to force the
door, and it was in this way that Parker took possession of the
residence to which Hough alone had a legal claim. The expelled
Fellows were not left to starve, as there was scarcely a gentleman
in England who would not have been proud to receive one of them into
his house.
14. =An Attempt to pack a Parliament. 1687.=--James was anxious to
obtain Parliamentary sanction for his Declaration of Indulgence. He
dissolved the existing Parliament, hoping to find a new one more to
his taste. As he had packed the Bench of Judges in =1686=, he tried
to pack a Parliament in =1687=. A board of regulators was appointed,
with Jeffreys at its head, to remodel the corporations once more,
appointing Roman Catholics and Dissenters to sit in them. James
expected that these new members would elect tolerationists to the
next House of Commons. So strong, however, was public opinion
against the king that even the new members chosen expressly to vote
for the king's nominees could not be relied on. The design of
calling a new Parliament was therefore abandoned for the time.
15. =A Second Declaration of Indulgence. 1688.=--On April 22,
=1688=, James issued a second Declaration of Indulgence, which he
ordered to be read in all the churches. Most of the clergy objecting
to read it, seven bishops signed a petition asking that the clergy
might be excused. Six of these bishops--Sancroft, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, who was the seventh, having been forbidden to appear
before the king--presented the petition to James at Whitehall. James
was startled when it was placed in his hands. "This," he said, "is a
great surprise to me. I did not expect this from your Church,
especially from some of you. This is a standard of rebellion." In
vain the bishops protested that they hated the very sound of
rebellion. James would not listen to their excuses. "This," he
persisted in saying, "is rebellion. This is a standard of rebellion.
Did ever a good churchman question the dispensing power before? Have
not some of you preached for it and written for it? It is a standard
of rebellion. I will have my declaration published." One of the
bishops replied that they were bound to fear God as well as to
honour the king. James only grew more angry and told them, as he
sent them away, that he would keep their petition, with the evident
intention of taking legal proceedings against them. "God," he said,
as he dismissed them, "has given me the dispensing power, and I will
maintain it. I tell you there are still seven thousand of your
Church who have not bowed the knee to Baal."
[Illustration: Dress of a bishop in the second half of the
seventeenth century: from Sandford's _Coronation Procession of James
II._]
16. =Resistance of the Clergy. 1688.=--When the day came for the
reading of the Declaration scarcely a clergyman obeyed the king's
order. In one of the London churches Samuel Wesley, father of the
John Wesley who was, by his preaching, to move the hearts of the
next generation, preached a sermon on the text, "Be it known unto
thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the
golden image which thou hast set up." In Westminster Abbey, when
the officiating minister, Bishop Sprat, a courtly prelate, began to
read the Declaration, the whole congregation rose in a body and
streamed out of the church.
17. =The Trial of the Seven Bishops. 1688.=--James ordered that the
seven bishops should be tried, on the plea that their petition was a
seditious libel. The trial took place in Westminster Hall on June
29. The first difficulty of the prosecution was to show that the
so-called libel had been published--that is to say, had been shown
to any one--as no one was present besides the bishops when James
received it, and the king could not be put into the witness-box. At
last sufficient evidence was tendered by the Earl of Sunderland--a
minister who, unlike Rochester, had changed his religion to keep his
place--to convince the court that the petition had been delivered to
James. The lawyers on both sides then addressed the jury on the
question whether the petition was really a libel. The jury retired
to deliberate, and at first nine of them were for the bishops and
three for the king. Two of the latter gave way, but the other, a
certain Arnold, who was the king's brewer, held out. "Whatever I
do," he said, "I am sure to be half ruined. If I say _Not Guilty_ I
shall brew no more for the king, and if I say _Guilty_ I shall brew
no more for anybody else." He decided that the king's custom was the
best worth keeping. To a gentleman named Austen who proposed to
argue with him he replied that his mind was already made up. "If you
come to that," replied Austen, "look at me. I am the largest and
strongest of this twelve; and before I find such a petition a libel,
here I will stay till I am no bigger than a tobacco pipe." The jury
were locked up through the night, and when the morning of the 30th
came Arnold had given way. A verdict of _Not Guilty_ was given in.
The crowds in Westminster Hall and in the streets of London burst
out into shouts of joy. At Hounslow, where James was reviewing the
regiments on which he trusted to break down all popular resistance,
the soldiers shouted like the rest. James asked what it all meant.
"Nothing," he was told; "the soldiers are glad that the bishops are
acquitted." "Do you call that nothing?" he answered. "So much the
worse for them."
18. =Invitation to William of Orange. 1688.=--The acquittal of the
Bishops would, but for one circumstance, have strengthened the
nation in its resolution patiently to wait till James's death placed
his daughter on the throne. On June 10, however, a son had been born
to James, and that fact changed the whole situation. The boy would
be educated in his father's religion, and England was threatened
with a Roman Catholic dynasty in which each successive ruler would,
from his childhood, be brought up in the belief that he might break
through all legal restraints whenever he could have the approval of
judges appointed by himself and liable to dismissal whenever he
pleased. At first the general dislike of this disagreeable fact took
the shape of incredulity, and it was almost universally believed,
without a shadow of foundation, that the boy was a supposititious
child procured from some poor mother and brought in a warming-pan
into the queen's chamber. Whether he were supposititious or not,
there was no doubt that he would be treated as James's heir. Tories
were as much concerned as Whigs at the prospect before them. The
doctrine of non-resistance was forgotten, and on June 30, the day of
the bishops' acquittal, seven important personages, some being Whigs
and some Tories, invited the Prince of Orange to land with an armed
force to defend the liberties of England.
19. =Landing of William. 1688.=--William would probably not have
accepted the invitation if the constitutional rights of Englishmen
had alone been at stake; but he had made it the object of his life
to struggle against Louis, and he knew that war was on the point of
breaking out between Louis and an alliance in which almost every
European prince took part excepting James. He accepted the
invitation that he might bring England into that alliance; and made
preparations, which could not be hidden from James. James made
concessions, abolished the Ecclesiastical Commission, gave back the
charters of the City of London and the other corporations, and
restored the Fellows of Magdalen. Anxious as William was to come, he
was delayed for some time. The army of Louis was on the southern
frontier of the Spanish Netherlands, and William could not stir as
long as an invasion of his Spanish allies was threatened. Louis,
however, offered James the assistance of his fleet to repel the
expected Dutch expedition. James replied that he was quite able to
take care of himself. Louis lost his temper, withdrew his army from
the frontier of the Netherlands, and sent it to begin the war with
the allies by burning and ravaging the Palatinate. William put to
sea, intending to land in Torbay. On the morning of November 5 it
was found that the fleet had passed the haven for which it was
bound; and as the wind was blowing it strongly on, there seemed no
possibility of returning. William believed that nothing but failure
was before him. "You may go to prayers, doctor," he said to Burnet,
an English clergyman who accompanied him; "all is over." In a moment
the wind changed and bore the fleet back into Torbay, and William
was enabled to land safely at Brixham. Burnet, a warm-hearted but
garrulous and inquisitive man, began asking him questions about his
plans. If there was one thing that William disliked more than
another, it was the interference of clergymen in military matters.
He therefore looked Burnet in the face, replying only by another
question: "Well, doctor, what do you think of predestination now?"
Both he and Burnet were convinced that God had Himself guided them
thus far in safety for the deliverance of His people.
20. =William's March upon London. 1688.=--William marched upon
London, and, after a while, the gentry of the counties through which
he passed poured in to support him. The north and the midlands rose
under the Earls of Devonshire and Danby and other lords, Whig and
Tory. The doctrine of non-resistance was thrown to the winds. James
set out with his troops to combat William. He reached Salisbury, but
the officers of his own army and his courtiers deserted him. Amongst
those who fled to William was Lord Churchill, afterwards known as
the Duke of Marlborough and the greatest soldier of the age. He had
received many favours from James, which he now repaid by inciting
all those whom he could influence to abandon their king. Amongst
these was James's younger daughter Anne, over whom Churchill's wife
exercised a most powerful influence, and who now, together with her
husband, Prince George of Denmark, fled to William. James, left
almost alone, made his way back to London, which he reached on
November 27. On the 30th he ordered the preparation of writs for the
election of a Parliament, and proposed an accommodation with
William, who by that time had reached Hungerford. It was agreed that
both armies should remain at a distance of forty miles from London
in order to enable the new Parliament to meet in safety. James was,
in reality, determined not to submit. On December 10 he sent his
wife and son to France. On the 11th he attempted to follow them,
burning the writs and dropping the great seal into the Thames, in
the hope that everything might fall into confusion for want of the
symbol of legitimate authority. There were riots in London, and the
Roman Catholic chapels were sacked and destroyed. There was a
general call to William to hasten his march. On the 12th, however,
James was stopped near Sheerness by some fishermen and brought back
to London. William had no mind to have a second royal martyr on his
hands, and did everything to frighten James into another flight. On
December 18 James left London and William arrived at Whitehall. On
December 23, with William's connivance, James embarked for France.
21. =A Convention Parliament Summoned. 1688.=--Amongst the crowd
which welcomed William was Sergeant Maynard, an old man of ninety.
"You must," said William to him, "have survived all the lawyers of
your standing." "Yes, sir," replied Maynard, "and, but for your
Highness, I should have survived the laws too." He expressed the
general sense of almost every Englishman. How to return to a legal
system with the least possible disturbance was the problem to be
faced. William consulted the House of Lords and an assembly composed
of all persons who had sat in any of Charles's Parliaments, together
with special representatives of the City. Members of James's one
Parliament were not summoned, on the plea that the return to it of
members chosen by the remodelled corporations made it no true
Parliament. The body thus consulted advised William to call a
Convention, which would be a Parliament in everything except that
there was no king to summon it.
22. =The Throne declared Vacant. 1689.=--On January 22, =1689=, the
Convention met. The House of Commons contained a majority of Whigs,
whilst the Tories were in a majority in the Lords. On the 28th the
Commons resolved that "king James II., having endeavoured to subvert
the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract
between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other
wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws and having
withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the government,
and that the throne had thereby become vacant." This lumbering
resolution was unanimously adopted. The Whigs were pleased with the
clause which made the vacancy of the throne depend on James's
misgovernment, and the Tories were pleased with the clause which
made it depend on his so-called voluntary abdication. The Tories in
the Lords proposed that James should remain nominally king, but that
the country should be governed by a regent. Danby, however, and a
small knot of Tories supported the Whigs, and the proposal was
rejected. Danby had, indeed, a plan of his own. James, he held, had
really abdicated, and the crown had therefore passed to the next
heir. That heir was not, according to him, the supposititious
infant, but the eldest daughter of James, Mary Princess of Orange,
who was now in her own right queen of England. It was an ingenious
theory, but two circumstances were against its being carried into
practice. In the first place, Mary scolded Danby for daring to set
her above her husband. In the second place William made it known
that he would neither be regent nor administer the government under
his wife. Danby therefore withdrew his motion, and on February 6 the
Lords voted, as the Commons had voted before, that James had
abdicated and the throne was vacant.
23. =William and Mary to be Joint Sovereigns. 1689.=--A Declaration
of Rights was prepared condemning the dispensing power as lately
exercised and the other extravagant actions of James II., while both
Houses concurred in offering the crown to William and Mary as joint
sovereigns. As long as William lived he was to administer the
government, Mary only attaining to actual power in the event of her
surviving her husband. After the death of both, the crown was to go
first to any children which might be born to them, then to Anne and
her children, and, lastly, to any children of William by a second
wife in case of his surviving Mary and marrying again. As a matter
of fact, William had no children by Mary, who died about eight years
before him, and he never married again. On February 13 William and
Mary accepted the crown on the conditions offered to them.
24. =Character of the Revolution.=--The main characteristic of the
revolution thus effected was that it established the supremacy of
Parliament by setting up a king and queen who owed their position to
a Parliamentary vote. People had been found to believe that James
II. was king by a Divine right. Nobody could believe that of
William. Parliament, which had set him up, could pull him down, and
he would have therefore to conform his government to the will of the
nation manifested in Parliament. The political revolution of =1689=
succeeded, whilst the Puritan Revolution of =1641= failed, because,
in =1641=, the political aim of setting the Parliament above the
king was complicated by an ecclesiastical dispute which had split
Parliament and the nation into two hostile parties. In =1689= there
was practically neither a political nor an ecclesiastical dispute.
Tories and Whigs combined to support the change, and Churchmen and
Dissenters made common cause against the small Roman Catholic
minority which had only been dangerous because it had the Crown at
its back, and because the Crown had been supported by Louis and his
armies. A Revolution thus effected was, no doubt, far less complete
than that which had been aimed at by the more advanced assailants of
the throne of Charles I. It did not aim at changing more than a
small part of the political constitution of the country, nor at
changing any part whatever of its social institutions. Its
programme, in short, was one for a single generation, not one, like
that of the '_Heads of the Proposals_' (see p. 555) or the
'_Agreement of the People_' (see p. 556) for several generations.
Consequently it did not rouse the antagonism which had been fatal
even to the best conceived plans of the Commonwealth and
Protectorate. It is much to be regretted that the moral tone of the
men who brought about the Revolution of =1689= was lower than that
which had brought about the Revolution of =1641=. That this was the
case, however, was mainly the fault of the unwise attempt of the
Puritans to enforce morality by law. The individual liberty which
was encouraged by the later revolution would in due time work for
morality as well as for political improvement.
_Books recommended for further study of Part VII._
RANKE, L. English History (English translation). Vol. iii. p.
310-vol. iv. p. 528.
AIRY, O. The English Restoration and Louis XIV.
CHRISTIE, W. D. Life of A. A. Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury.
MACAULAY, Lord. History of England from the Accession of James II.
Vols. i. and ii.
HALLAM, H. Constitutional History. Chapters XI.-XIV.
MAHAN, A. T. Influence of the Sea-power upon History. Chapters
I.-III.
LODGE, R. The Political History of England. Vol. viii. From the
Restoration to the Death of William III. (1660-1702).
INDEX TO THE SECOND VOLUME
Abbey lands, the, distributed by Henry VIII., 400;
Mary wishes for the restoration of, 422
Aberdeen, Montrose's victory at, 547
Abhorrers, party name of, 620
Addled Parliament, the, 486
_Admonition to Parliament, An_, 446
Adwalton Moor, battle of, 538
Agitators, choice of, 554;
propose to purge the House, 556
_Agreement of the People, the_, drawn up by the Agitators, 556
Agriculture, More's views on the decline of, 368;
progress of, in Elizabeth's reign, 464
Aix-la-Chapelle, peace of, 599
Alasco, opinions of, 418
Albemarle, George Monk, Duke of, as George Monk, commands in
Scotland, 575;
effects the restoration, 576;
created Duke of Albemarle, 580;
holds a command in the battle off the North Foreland, 592;
advises Charles II. not to dissolve Parliament, 599
Alençon, Francis, Duke of, Elizabeth proposes to marry, 446;
entertained by Elizabeth, 454;
attacks Antwerp, 455;
death of, 456
Alexander VI., Pope, character of, 375
Alford, battle of, 549
Allen, Cardinal, founds a college at Douai, 453;
plots to murder Elizabeth, 454
Alva, Duke of, his tyranny in the Netherlands, 443;
discusses the murder of Elizabeth, 445;
fails to reduce the Dutch, 449
Amicable Loan, the, 372
Anjou, Henry, Duke of, _see_ Henry III., king of France
Annates, first Act of, 388;
second Act of, 390
Anne, daughter of James II., birth of, 608;
deserts James II., 645;
settlement of the crown on, 647
Anne Boleyn, appears at Court, 380;
is married to Henry VIII., 389;
execution of, 395
Anne of Cleves married to Henry VIII., 400;
divorce of, 401
Antwerp attacked by Alençon, 455;
taken by Parma, 456
Appeals, Act of, 389;
provision for the hearing of, 391
Architecture, Elizabethan, 465;
Stuart, 631, 632
_Areopagitica_, 546
Argyle, Archibald Campbell, Earl of, execution of, 636
Argyle, Archibald Campbell, Marquis of, opposed to Montrose, 547;
execution of, 595
Arlington, Henry Bennet, Earl of, secretary to Charles II., 599;
intrigues against Clifford, 607
Armada, the Invincible, sailing of, 458;
destruction of, 462
Army, the New Model, formation of, 545;
attempt of Parliament to disband, 553;
choice of Agitators in, 554;
gains possession of the king's person, 555;
the heads of the proposals presented in the name of, _ib._;
drives out the eleven members, _ib._;
turns against the king, 556, 557;
expels members by Pride's Purge, _ib._;
its inability to reconstruct society after the king's execution, 560;
overthrows Richard Cromwell, restores and expels the Rump, 575;
brings back the Rump, _ib._;
receives Charles II. on Blackheath, 578;
paid off, 584
Army, the Royal, beginning of, 584
Army plot, the, 531
Articles, the ten, 395;
the six, 399;
the forty-two, 420;
the thirty-nine, _ib._;
declaration of Charles I., prefixed to, 512
Arundel Castle taken and lost by Hopton, 542
Ashley, Lord, _see_ Shaftesbury, Earl of
Aske heads the Pilgrimage of Grace, 397
Assembly of divines, proposal to refer church questions to, 534;
meeting of, 540;
declares for Presbyterianism, 543
Association, the, in defence of Elizabeth, 456
Attainder, Bill of, against Thomas Cromwell, 401;
nature of a, _ib._, note i.;
against Strafford, 531
Auldearn, battle of, 547
Babington plots the murder of Elizabeth, 457
Bacon, Francis (Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Alban), scientific
aspirations of, 474;
advises Elizabeth as to the treatment of the Catholics, 475;
his conduct to Essex, 478;
gives political advice to James I., 486;
his jest on Montague's promotion, 494;
attacked about monopolies, 495;
disgrace of, 496
Bagenal defeated by Hugh O'Neill, 475
Ballard takes part in Babington's plot, 457
Barbadoes, prisoners sent to, 564;
dissenters sent to, 588
Barebone's Parliament, the, origin of the name of, 566;
dissolution of, 567
Baronets, origin of the order of, 494
Barrow, Henry, a separatist, hanged, 470
Barrow, Isaac, addresses his sermons to the understanding, 598
Basing House taken by Cromwell, 549
Bastwick sentenced by the Star Chamber, 521
Bate's case, 484
Baxter, imprisoned by Jeffreys, 635
Beaton, Cardinal, burns Wishart, 412;
is murdered, 414
Bedingfield, Sir Henry, takes charge of Elizabeth, 423
Benevolences raised by James I., 497
Berwick, Treaty of, 526
Bible, the, Henry VIII. authorises the translation of, 396
Bishops, nominated by _congé d'élire_, 391;
first Bill for removing from the House of Lords, 533;
impeachment of the twelve, 535;
excluded from the House of Lords, 536
Bishops' War, the first, 526;
the second, 529
Blackwater, the, defeat of Bagenal on, 475
Blake, defends Taunton, 548;
appointed to command the fleet, 565;
sent to the Mediterranean, 571;
destroys Spanish ships at Santa Cruz, 573;
death of, _ib._
Bloody Assizes, the, 637
Bocher, Joan, burnt, 419
Bohemia, outbreak of the Thirty Year War in, 490
Boleyn, Anne, _see_ Anne Boleyn
Bombay acquired by Charles II., 587
Bonner, Bishop, deprived of his see, 416
Booth, Sir George, defeated at Winnington Bridge, 575
Bothwell, James Hepburn, Earl of, career of, 439
Bothwell Bridge, defeat of the Covenanters at, 620
Boulogne, taken by Henry VIII., 405;
surrendered by Warwick, 417
Bourbon, the Duke of, revolt of, 371;
death of, 374
Boxley, destruction of the rood of, 398
Breda, declaration of, 576;
treaty of, 593
Brentford, Charles I. at, 537
Bridgman, Sir Orlando, declares that the king's ministers are
responsible, 581
Bridgwater taken by Fairfax, 549;
Monmouth at, 637
Brill seized by exiles from the Netherlands, 449
Bristol stormed by Rupert, 538
Browne, Archbishop of Dublin, destroys relics and images in Ireland, 402
Browne, Robert, founder of the Separatists, 470
Brownists, _see_ Separatists
Bucer, Martin, teaches in England, 410
Buckingham, George Villiers, First Duke of, becomes Marquis of
Buckingham and Lord Admiral, 488;
accompanies Charles to Madrid, 497;
becomes Duke of Buckingham, and advocates war with Spain, 500;
promises money for foreign wars, 501;
his ascendency over Charles I., 502;
tries to pawn the crown jewels, 503;
lends ships to fight against Rochelle, 504;
impeachment of, 505;
leads an expedition to Ré, 506;
feeling of Wentworth towards, 508;
murder of, 510
Buckingham, George Villiers, Second Duke of, in favour with
Charles II., 599;
his sham treaty with France, 603;
dismissal of, 608
Buckingham, Henry Stafford, Duke of, execution of, 369
Buildings, improvement in, in Elizabeth's time, 465
Bunyan writes _Pilgrim's Progress_, 596
Burghley, William Cecil, Lord, as Sir William Cecil becomes the
chief adviser of Elizabeth, 429;
urges Elizabeth to assist the Scotch Protestants, 433;
becomes Lord Burghley and discovers the Ridolfi plot, 445;
death of, 480
Burnet, Gilbert, his conversation with William of Orange, 645
Burton, sentenced by the Star Chamber, 521
Butler, author of _Hudibras_, 597
Cadiz, capture of, 464;
Cecil's expedition to, 503
Calais, loss of, 427;
Elizabeth's hope of regaining, 436;
the Armada takes refuge in, 462;
Cromwell's anxiety to recover, 571
Calvin, his work at Geneva, 430
Calvinism influences Elizabethan Protestantism, 430
Cambrai, league of, 363;
treaty of, 383
Campeggio, Cardinal, appointed legate to hear the divorce case
of Henry VIII., 382
Campion lands in England, 453;
execution of, 454
Carberry Hill, Mary's surrender at, 439
Cardinal College founded by Wolsey, 377, 383;
_see_ Christchurch
Carisbrooke Castle, detention of Charles I. in, 556
Carolina, colonisation of, 629
Cartwright advocates the Presbyterian system, 446
Casket letters, the, 440
Castlemaine, Lady, uses her influence against Clarendon, 594
Câteau Cambresis, peace of, 431
Catesby plans Gunpowder Plot, 483
Catharine of Aragon, marriage of, 363;
Henry VIII. grows tired of, 379;
divorce suit against, 382;
is divorced, 389;
the sentence of Clement VII. in favour of, 390;
death of, 395
Catharine of Braganza marries Charles II., 587
Catherine de Medicis, widow of Henry II., king of France, becomes
regent, 433;
takes part in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 449
Catherine Howard, marriage and execution of, 401
Catherine Parr, marriage of, 401
Catholics, Roman, laws directed against, 453, 454;
their position at the end of Elizabeth's reign, 475;
increased persecution of, after Gunpowder Plot, 483;
negotiation between James I. and Spain for the relief of, 488;
tendency of Charles II. to support, 584;
declaration for the toleration of, issued by Charles II., 587;
persecuted about the Popish Plot, 616;
efforts of James II. in favour of, 634, 638, 640
Cecil, Sir Edward, commands the Cadiz expedition, 503
Chancery, Court of, proposal of the Barebone's Parliament to
suppress, 567;
reformed by Cromwell, 569;
nature of the decisions of, 605
Chantries, Act for the dissolution of, 412;
their income vested in the king, 415