A History of Britain, Volume 2 (42 page)

During the 1670s something much more serious than traded abuse was going on in English politics. Positions were hardening and polemics flying. No one in 1678 was ready to predict, much less desire, a new civil war. But equally no one thought that some sort of fundamental crisis about the government of England, some sort of ‘revolution' in fact (in the contemporary sense of the term), was likely to be averted, so long as the heir apparent remained the avowedly Catholic, suspiciously quasi-absolutist James, Duke of York. In 1677, before Titus Oates ever opened his mouth, the MP for Hull, the poet Andrew Marvell, neither the most credulous nor the most opportunist of Englishmen, who had come of age, politically, in the Protectorate, let it be known in print that ‘There has now for divers Years, a Design been carried on, to change the Lawful Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to Convert the Established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery.'

The fact that the kind of convictions expressed in Marvell's
Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England
were so commonplace helps to explain the otherwise astoundingly hysterical response to Oates's ‘revelations' of a plot, masterminded by the Jesuits, to murder the king (some of his ‘informants' believed by the knife, others by poison), to replace him with the Duke of York and to institute a French-Catholic absolutist state supported by French troops. The allegations were, of course, a pack of ugly lies, but they were artfully concocted ugly lies. Titus Oates was a monster of malignant ingenuity, but he was no fool. His active homosexuality had ensured that in his twenty-nine years there was virtually no major English institution from which he had not been ejected: his Cambridge college (Gonville and Caius); his Church of England ministry in Kent; the navy, where he had signed on as chaplain to avoid perjury charges incurred while a curate; and finally he had been thrown out of the Jesuit colleges Colegio de los Inglese Valladolid, in Spain, and St Omer, in France, where he had gone as a purported convert. All of these places, of course, had offered Oates both irresistible opportunities and draconian penalties. But in his relatively short scapegrace life Oates had already shown himself to be an accomplished predator who, even when found out, managed somehow to avoid the worst consequences of his malice.

He was clever enough, in fact, to turn the latest notoriety, expulsion by the Jesuits, into something like evidence of both knowledge and integrity! As Oates rolled off his fantastic whoppers, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone to wonder whether or not his rough treatment at the hands of the Jesuits (though not as rough as the navy) might not have been a motive for a campaign of personal revenge. Shamelessly, Oates claimed that he had only gone over to St Omer as a kind of spiritual double-agent, the better to plumb their nefarious designs on the liberties and Church of England. And to give this outlandish claim more credibility, Oates acted as though he was indeed some sort of self-appointed spy, keeping as many careful notes and records of conversations with the Jesuits and their hireling assassins, both at home and abroad, as Robert Hooke or John Evelyn made of their experiments and their gardens. Oates was, in his own repulsive way, a
virtuoso,
lavishing as much attention and care on the fabrication of truth as the natural philosophers paid to the acquiring of it. In fact, the first person to whom Oates confided his knowledge of the Plot, the London clergyman Israel Tonge, flattered himself with the reputation of a scholar (he did in fact have an authentic doctorate) and kept company with some of the most eminent of the Fellows of the Royal Society. This did not, however, make Tonge rational, since he subscribed to the popular fantasy that the Great Fire of London
had been started by Catholic arsonists. And it was that conflagration that had destroyed Tonge's vicarage along with his library of natural philosophy – had, in fact, ruined his life.

It was because Tonge had such powerful connections that he managed to get Oates an audience with the king himself to hear the shocking substance of the forty-three articles of the conspiracy. Charles was, understandably, incredulous; but his initial amusement at the improbability of the whole story, not least the incrimination of the queen's doctor, gradually gave way to enough anxiety to send the matter on to Danby. In the last week of September 1678 Oates appeared before the full Privy Council, and his apparent mastery of minutiae convinced some of them at least that there might be something to the story, however fantastic it seemed at first.

Oates knew his public. He had mixed into his story exactly the kind of sensationalism the suggestibly anti-Catholic public loved to hear: arson, poison, criminal doctors, wicked queens, malevolent monks. And as details leaked out, the story took fire like lightning striking dry leaves. The high-ups fanned the flames. Whether he believed it or not (and there is no reason to suppose he did not believe it) Shaftesbury saw it as Danby's come-uppance and railed against the first minister, who, while pretending to keep the country safe from Catholic intrigue, had actually invited it. At this stage, sceptics were still attempting to keep the thin walls of common sense from collapsing altogether. But two pieces of unexpected good luck for Oates ensured the rout of reason. First, one of the innumerable figures named in his list of the wicked, the Duchess of York's secretary, Edward Coleman, had actually corresponded with Louis XIV's confessor about the chances of a Catholic restoration in England – not in itself an act of criminal treason, rather an act of criminal stupidity, since Coleman had failed to destroy the letters and left them to be easily decoded. Even better, on 17 October, the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found on the grassy slopes of Primrose Hill. Godfrey just happened to be the magistrate who had first taken Oates's sworn deposition about the plot. Speculation that he might have committed suicide rapidly gave way to a verdict that Godfrey had been murdered. Only the most ingenious and desperate thought that the culprits had actually belonged to the
anti
-Catholic hue and cry, trying to provoke a violent reaction.

If that were in fact the case they had done their work very well, since Godfrey's body was publicly exhibited surrounded by candles, as if he had been martyred in the cause of saving Protestant England. Mania now took possession of the country. Conveniently, November was, thanks to Guy Fawkes, the month for anti-Catholic bonfires. Now the 5 November
celebrations turned into massive ‘Pope Burnings', some attended by thousands of people. More Pope Burnings took place on 17 November, the anniversary of the accession of Good Queen Bess who had stood strong and steadfast against the Romish threat. The public imagination was gripped by the vision of imaginary Catholic ‘night riders' roaming the countryside, looking for Anglican clergymen or justices of the peace to murder. To guard against the threat, apprentice gangs armed themselves, some of them with the ‘Edmund Berry Godfrey' daggers that were so popular that 3000 of them had been sold in a day. By the time that Oates appeared before the full House of Commons he was able to state quite categorically and without fear of contradiction that ‘there has been and still is a damnable and hellish plot, contrived and carried on by Popish recusants for the assassinating and murdering of the King and for subverting the government and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion.'

Seeing a genuinely popular movement boiling up from below like some volcanic discharge, Shaftesbury, who had his own paid agents, made sure to channel the energy to his own and his party's advantage. Enthusiastically and inventively perjured ‘informants' and ‘witnesses' were paraded before parliament, beginning with the swindler and thief, William Bedloe, who claimed to have direct knowledge that Jesuits had killed Godfrey and to have seen his body at the queen's palace at Somerset House. Accusations of treason and murder now moved from known Catholics and priests to alleged ‘sympathizers', among them Samuel Pepys. A former servant testified that Pepys had all along been a secret Catholic; and, much more damagingly, another long-time crook, John Scott, swore that he personally knew Pepys to have favoured and advanced Catholic officers in the navy and to have given the French plans of fortifications and ships in preparation for their planned invasion. It was enough to send Pepys to the Tower of London, where John Evelyn dined with him and sympathized with his plight. But it was a back-handed tribute to the plausibility of Oates's conspiracy story that even Fellows of the Royal Society, who were supposed to have no difficulty in recognizing the truth when they saw it, differed among themselves. For poor Pepys, the whole thing was a tissue of villainy. Evelyn hated Oates no less, but found him regrettably credible. To his credit, Pepys was not prepared to let the infamy roll over him. He fought back by hiring his own investigator, one John Joyne, to ingratiate himself with Scott, follow his movements and produce evidence of his disreputable life – not, as it turned out, a hard task. Pepys survived, unlike the twenty-four innocents who lost their lives to the witch-hunt.

By the end of 1679, after a Pope Burning attended, it was said, by a crowd of 200,000, the ugly energy unleashed by the Plot was converted by Shaftesbury into a specific political programme. Danby's intimidated government had crumbled and he himself faced impeachment unless, Shaftesbury made it clear, a new election was called. Monster petitions were mobilized (again recalling the 1640s); one from London, Southwark and Westminster was 300 feet long and bore 16,000 names. The king conceded. The election – contested in an unprecedented number of boroughs – was fought, sometimes bitterly and violently, and duly produced exactly the overwhelming Whig majority in the Commons that Shaftesbury needed. It came to Westminster, moreover, hot for a specific political goal, Exclusion: the elimination of the Catholic Duke of York (and any heirs he might have with Mary of Modena) from the line of succession. On Charles's death, the crown was to pass instead to his eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. For that matter, so Shaftesbury's propaganda claimed, the Duke was actually no bastard at all but the legitimate heir, since Charles, unbeknownst to everyone at the time and since, had actually married his mistress Lucy Walter during their relationship in Paris.

It was an extraordinary crisis in the life of the British monarchy. At stake were not only the lives of countless hundreds victimized by the lies and hysteria but also the fate of the polity itself. To concede the Exclusion was to accept that parliament had the constitutional authority to judge the fitness or unfitness of a prince to succeed to or occupy the throne. And neither Charles II nor the Tories were about to make that concession.
Patriarcha,
a treatise actually written fifty years before by the Kentish gentleman philosopher Sir Robert Filmer, was now published. It argued that God had directly given earthly authority to Adam, from whom all kings were lineally descended – a direct line of succession that could never be broken by any kind of inferior intervention. Shaftesbury and the Whigs in their turn revived some of the most radical thought surviving from the Commonwealth that insisted on the contractual nature of the monarchy – not least, of course, the first of John Locke's
Two Treatises on Government.
Much of this was too heady for most of the Whig rank and file in the Commons, who were easier with the familiar platitude (recycled, for example, by Denzil Holles, still very much in action) that in England monarchy had always been bound by the law, not least its obligation to uphold the coronation oaths, and that parliament most certainly did have a right, not only to judge the degree to which those obligations had been kept but also to ‘bind, govern, limit, restrain and govern the descent and inheritance of the Crown'.

Shaftesbury, though, had left his days with Oliver Cromwell far
behind. He was no Ireton, not even a Pym. Ultimately he shrank from pushing Exclusion to the point where he might be forced to mobilize a new civil war over it. And the more his side was actually accused by the Crown and the Tories of wanting exactly that outcome, the more Shaftesbury recoiled from it. It was prudence rather than political queasiness that brought him up short before committing the country to a conflict he was doubtful he could ever win.

He was right. But where did that fatal pessimism leave him? Since he was not prepared to contemplate another revolution for a kingless England, Shaftesbury was fatally dependent on the force of public opinion and intimidation persuading Charles II to capitulate voluntarily to Exclusion. But there was something about the extremity to which he had been put that drew from the languid old lecher a demonstration of such political toughness and finesse that it ran rings round Shaftesbury, supposedly the great master of strategy. First, Charles sent his deeply unpopular brother and his wife out of the country, thereby removing from the scene the person who provoked most hatred and fury. But having made a concession, Charles then proceeded to stamp his high heels on the principles that mattered. On the issue of the exclusively royal prerogative to rule in matters of succession, Charles was as adamant as Elizabeth had been a century before. If, as seemed all but certain, he died childless, James, Catholic or not,
would
succeed. But – and this was the critical manoeuvre – as long as James insisted on remaining a Catholic, his would have to be a reign with a difference. Whatever his private beliefs, they could not affect the solemn obligation embodied in the coronation oaths to defend and protect the established Protestant Church of England. And to allay the suspicions that had got his father into such irreversible trouble, the Catholic king would have to agree to abstain from making his own appointments to high ecclesiastical office and transfer control of military appointments to parliament.

It was an inspired circumnavigation of the conflict. The Church had surely been saved, without compromising the authority of the Crown in matters regarding succession. And Charles's ‘expedient' seemed reasonable enough to begin turning public opinion back towards the king. But when a second Whig-dominated House of Commons was elected (after Charles had dissolved the first), Shaftesbury was too confident in his apparent triumph to notice the slight tremor in the ground under him until it became the gaping fault that swallowed him up. The Commons passed an Exclusion Bill by a two-to-one majority, while the Lords defeated it by the same majority. The deadlock meant that Charles was in a position to call Shaftesbury's bluff, and he coolly proceeded to do so (after having
taken the precautionary measure of pocketing another massive hand-out from Louis XIV). In 1681 a third parliament was summoned to Oxford, where the Crown and its enemies had tested their wills in 1258. All sweet reason, Charles tabled his ‘expedient' once more, only to have it brushed aside, as he had calculated, by Shaftesbury's insistence on Exclusion. The only way forward now was a resolution by force. Indeed, some of the Whigs showed up at Oxford in arms, while others talked openly of a return to the Commonwealth – exactly the ammunition Charles needed to make his case that it was the Exclusionists, not the loyalists, who were pushing the country towards civil war. In the end, he knew that Shaftesbury just did not have the stomach for a true battle; and just in case he did, with Louis XIV's gold jingling in the royal treasure chest, Charles knew that this time, unlike in 1642, the Crown had the funds to mobilize in a hurry.