A History of Britain, Volume 2 (41 page)

With that marriage, and the prospect of a Catholic heir, the threshold of anti-Catholic hysteria dramatically lowered. A year or so earlier, James had gone public for the first time, declaring his return to the Roman Church by conspicuously failing to attend Anglican communion at Easter. This calculated advertisement of his confessional allegiance put the Anglican hierarchy and the gentry in the shires on notice that, unless something changed, they could expect a Papist king and perhaps a Papist dynasty to follow. Hackles rose in Hampshire. Paranoid though the reaction was, had the guardians of the Anglican settlement known the whole truth their suspicions would have turned to apoplexy. For on 25 January 1669 (significantly, the feast of the conversion of St Paul) Charles II had expressed his regrets to his brother that he was not able to profess openly the faith to which he too was genuinely drawn. No one (other than the Pope himself) could have been gladder to hear of this than Louis XIV, who had been targeting his own secret weapon – the glamorous Louise de Kéroualle – directly at the place he knew it was bound to score a direct hit: Charles II's bed. It certainly did no harm to the French king's strategy. For Louise cantered between the royal sheets, routing her rivals, as brilliantly as Louis triumphed on the battlefield, and Charles was helplessly seduced by both of them. Louise bore Charles a son in 1672 and in 1673 was made Duchess of Portsmouth. And in 1670, Charles was grateful enough to sign a clandestine treaty with Louis. Although he was encouraged in this direction by some of his inner circle of ministers – particularly Lord Ashley, Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, and Thomas Clifford – the terms of the treaty were shocking enough to be kept from the majority of the Privy Council and especially the dourly suspicious Scot, John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale. This was just as well, since any objective observer would have to conclude that what Charles had done, in his obtuse recklessness, was to mortgage his sovereignty to the king of France, or rather replace dependence on an English parliament by dependence on the bounty of the French purse. In return for a Versailles hand-out, handsome enough to free Charles from the inconvenience of having to go cap in hand every few years to parliament, the English king had committed himself to easing the conditions of English Catholics and perhaps, when a suitable occasion arose, even declaring his own true confessional
allegiance. And there was more. Charles had committed himself to joining Louis's surprise attack on the Protestant Dutch Republic, a policy much easier to justify in England as payback for the humiliation of 1667.

To suggestions that some sort of deal had been made with France, Charles II simply lied, flatly denying there had been any under-the-table treaty. In fact, the provisions of the secret Treaty of Dover exceeded the most feverish nightmares of anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists. The birthright that Charles had casually bartered away was, after all, not his to give away but parliament's. And there was still worse. Had the king bothered to reflect in any detail on the issues that had caused so much grief for his father in 1641, he might have recalled that the suspicion that Charles I was about to call in a foreign, Catholic (Irish) army had been top of the list. That had been the red rag waved at the parliamentary bull, which more than anything else had provoked them to strip the king of his control of the militia. It had, in fact, triggered the civil war. So what did his son do in 1670 but agree to the importation of
French
troops in the event of facing his own domestic rebellion?

Some of Charles's ministers who led him into this suicidally reckless stratagem had their own reasons. Clifford, as it would be discovered before he committed suicide, was a secret Catholic. Lord Arlington probably was, too, although he justified the Declaration of Indulgence of March 1672 essentially as a measure designed to strengthen, not weaken, the security of the state, especially against Nonconformists notorious for their unreconciled republicanism. For while the Declaration meant that Catholics were now allowed to worship in
private
houses (a detail that did nothing to allay suspicions), Dissenters, ostensibly receiving even-handed treatment, were required to apply for the official licensing of their places of gathering and worship.

The dramatic, undeclared opening of Charles's second war against the Dutch in May 1672 and the success of both English warships and Louis XIV's armies, who occupied two-thirds of the country, reducing the most powerful state in the world to chaos, was such an unalloyed source of gloating to patriotic opinion, still smarting from the débâcle of 1667, that for a while it silenced questions about the king's motives for issuing the Declaration of Indulgence. But quite quickly the war deteriorated and with it any kind of consensus. The young Prince of Orange, William III, took over as the Captain and Admiral-General of the panic-stricken Dutch Republic, on the brink, so it seemed, of annihilation. The scapegoats of the nightmare, the brothers De Witt, who had led the Republic to the great victory of 1667 and then into this catastrophe, were physically torn to pieces on the streets of The Hague. William, who had been
kept powerless by Jan De Witt, shed no tears. But nor did he capitulate to the aggression. Instead of coming to terms, as expected, with the kings of France and England (both of whom were his relatives), William became an overnight Protestant hero by rallying his Fatherland to all-out defiant resistance. Flattering comparisons were made with his great-grandfather, William the Silent. The dykes were once again cut, as they had been almost exactly a century before, and Louis XIV's army, like Philip II's, became literally bogged down. Instead of mopping up resistance, it sank into the peaty mire. Dutch fleets began to inflict brutal attacks on English and French ships, and very quickly the war consensus inside the English government unravelled as defeats presented irresistible opportunities for critics among the country party to present the botched war and the Declaration of Indulgence as a sell-out to the Gallo-Catholic menace.

The incoming administration, committed to making a separate peace with the Dutch and reversing the Declaration of Indulgence, was led by Thomas Osborne, shortly to be Lord Danby. Although every bit as ambitious and self-seeking as the men he replaced, Danby was the very first English politician to present himself to the nation, quite self-consciously, as the Voice of the Shires: the country gentleman's friend and mouthpiece, fiercely Anglican, staunchly conservative, unquestionably royalist, but in an English, not a Frenchified, way. His government set its seal on power by forcing (on pain of denying the king revenues) the rescinding of the Declaration of Indulgence. In its place was put an anti-Catholic Test Act, which required all holders of any public office – including magistrates, members of parliament and officers of state, or of the army and navy – to deny the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and to conform in every way with the Anglican settlement. Thus the two pillars of Charles's rapprochement with Louis – toleration for Catholics and the anti-Dutch war – were simultaneously shattered. Privately, Charles let his regrets be known but complained that his hands were tied by parliament. Privately, Louis thought any king who would permit such contemptible insolence was hardly worthy of the office. Most incomprehensible of all to him was Charles's willingness to see his own brother, the next in line to the throne, deprived of his high office as Lord High Admiral for refusing to take a ‘Test' imposed on royal blood by a noisy rabble of presumptuous commoners.

After the upheaval of 1672–3, the five years of the Danby regime that followed are often presented as some sort of placid recuperation, in which the potentially explosive nature of anti-Catholicism had been neutralized by heavy doses of Anglican rectitude and all around happiness with the status quo. By this account the even more tumultuous,
near-revolutionary crisis that followed the ‘revelation' of the fake Popish Plot came out of a clear blue sky as well as out of the criminally paranoid brains of Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. But their bizarre allegations of Catholic plots to assassinate the king and replace him with the Duke of York could not possibly have sent the country into the most extreme political convulsion it had experienced since the civil war unless the ground had been very well prepared in the preceding years. For if Danby's original claim to power had rested on his promise to purge the body politic of anything resembling pro-French Catholicism, many of his critics came to the conclusion that the remedy seemed worse than the disease. Danby's management of members of parliament as something like a ‘Crown' party; his manipulation of patronage conditional on political obedience; his attempt to make office-holders sign a formal renunciation of any resistance to the monarch on any grounds; and his willingness to perpetuate, indefinitely, the life of the already long-lived Cavalier Parliament of 1661, all seemed evidence that he was actually making English government over in the image of the absolutism he professed to abhor.

These critics were not altogether wrong. Before the 1670s, opposition to governments had been moved by, and expressed in, dislike of particular men (Strafford or Clarendon) and particular measures (ship money). Not since 1640–42 had politics been articulated in such sharply ideological terms. And it was the adversaries of the power of the Crown, so apparently entrenched by Danby, who made the going. Lord Shaftesbury, who as Anthony Ashley Cooper had been successively a Barebone's MP, a Cromwellian Councillor of State and a Restoration Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been seen as the epitome of the scoundrelly opportunist, reaching for whatever politics was most likely to propel him into power and keep him there. And Shaftesbury was certainly not free of opportunism. He had, after all, been evicted from office by Danby and was impatient for revenge. But without perverting the truth too indecently, Shaftesbury could, as he began to don the mantle of the Guardian of the Ancient Constitution, plausibly claim to be revolving back to the principles that had begun his political career: the Cromwellian polity sketched out in the Humble Petition and Advice of 1657 of a ‘government of a single person and [a bicameral] parliament'. There was, after all, a rich historical tradition to draw on, stretching back even beyond the Provisions of Oxford and Magna Carta to the purported Saxon
witangemot,
which insisted that royal power had always rested on conciliar consent. What made the royal polity of England English, and especially un-French, was that it had always been a contract. This is what the Stuarts, misled by councillors like Danby who hoped to swell their own fortunes
on the back of an over-mighty sovereignty, failed to understand. Any subject expecting to be protected from the ever present Catholic-tyrannical menace across the Channel by Crown-engrossers such as Danby was deceived. For only under an authentically English mixed monarchy, one prepared to concede that sovereignty was shared among king, Lords and Commons, could the liberties of the people and the Protestant Church be truly safeguarded.

During the 1670s, precisely because Danby's domination of parliament was so successful and the royalist ideology of divine right and non-resistance so entrenched, those who begged to differ had to look elsewhere to broadcast their competing view of the constitution. So it was in the streets, coffee-houses, clubs, taverns and printing shops rather than at Westminster that in the 1670s the rough prototype of party politics was born. Clubs like Shaftesbury's Green Ribbon, meeting at the King's Head tavern in Chancery Lane, where like-minded members could convince themselves of the wickedness of the Crown party and the existence of a Catholic conspiracy, multiplied, so that by the time the Popish Plot broke there were no fewer than twenty-nine such clubs in London alone and the most successful produced provincial affiliates in towns like Taunton, Bristol and Oxford. London's rapidly multiplying coffee-houses offered, as one astonished visitor from Florence testified, snug alcoves where news could be thirstily digested, along with one's coffee or chocolate, quite free of official censure or intimidation. Some were famous hotbeds of gossip, among them Hooke's and Wren's favourite, Garway's in Change Alley, London (where tea was introduced to England along with constitutional radicalism), and Aubrey's Rainbow in Fleet Street. The clash of polemics during the 1670s had fuelled a phenomenal resurgence in the business of multiple-copied ‘separates' and intelligences on politics that streamed out into the provinces from London, and that made exhilarating reading compared to the drearily official
Gazette.
Between 1679 and 1682 no fewer than seventeen new newspapers would be founded, most of them expressly to promote a party view. Other spectres of political life of the 1640s and 1650s returned to harass Charles II as they had Charles I and Cromwell. Petitioning movements, which had not been seen since the Commonwealth, began to be mobilized again, especially when some sort of Catholic bogey was the motivator. Apprentice gangs – the sons of men who had taken to the streets in the 1640s – now reappeared with all their old, violent energy. Satirical poems, squibs and broadsides, which had long been available to high-placed patrons, now put on their street dress: ballads and bawdy verse hawked in the taverns. The theatrical innuendo became an art form. The galleries waited for it, then lapped it up, hooted
and brayed with pleasure. And none of the scribblers could complain that Charles II had failed to provide them with rich material.

None of this, it has been well said (though perhaps too often), yet amounted to anything like a world divided by recognizably
modern
party politics. Loyalties were still notoriously fickle, their protagonists quite capable of switching sides at the drop of a hat. None the less, the embattled ideologies – divine right kingship and the ‘mixed' monarchy – did represent two genuinely and mutually incompatible visions of what the authentic political constitution of England had been and ought to be. Whigs, in particular, liked to reach back to medieval statutes to emphasize the continuity of a peculiar English tradition, Shaftesbury insisting that ‘the parliament of England is that Supreme and absolute power which gives life and Motion to the English government', the patriotic mantra drummed home over and over. Conversely, each of them identified their opponents as embodying politics that were, literally as well as metaphorically, foreign to England. Which is why the aggressively and self-consciously English antagonists in this war of ideas reached for the most unsavoury foreign labels they could think of by which to demonize their opponents, namely something associated with either the Scots or the Irish. Thus (a few years later during the Exclusion crisis surrounding James's succession), the defenders of Crown supremacy took to name-calling those whom they accused of dragging the country back to a civil war as Scots-Presbyterian outlaws or ‘Whiggamores', and the Whigs returned the compliment by claiming that behind the disingenuous arguments to stand by Church and throne, their adversaries were nothing more than Irish-Catholic rebels or ‘Tories', from the Gaelic
toraighe
, meaning a bog-trotter or bandit.