Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (66 page)

The Earl of Danby and the Court and Country Blocs, 1673–8

By the early 1670s, popery and the French, not Dissent and the Dutch, had reemerged as the English people’s greatest nemeses. The king and royal family had also lost credit, for they stood revealed not only as pro-Catholic and pro-French but also as fiscally and militarily incompetent. In order to correct this public relations disaster, the king chose as his new lord treasurer and first minister a conservative Anglican, Sir Thomas Osborne (1632–1712), whom he soon elevated to the title Lord Osborne, and then in 1674, earl of Danby. Danby’s first task was to give the government and its policies enough of an Anglican face to defuse fears about Catholicism. He did this, first, by securing the appointment of like-minded Anglican and Royalist gentlemen to offices at both the center and in the localities. Second, he forged an alliance with the bishops to support the Church in general and to persecute Catholics and Dissenters in particular. The period of Danby’s ministry saw the strictest enforcement of the Cavalier Code yet: Catholics were fined, Dissenting services were broken up, and repeat offenders imprisoned. Third, he insisted that James’s two daughters, Princesses Mary and Anne, be raised as Anglicans and, when old enough, marry Protestants. In 1677 Mary wed William of Orange, Louis XIV’s greatest enemy. Six years later, Anne married Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708), who had also distinguished himself as a military leader and a fervent Protestant.

These marriages had both foreign policy and domestic implications. The Dutch marriage, in particular, was the linchpin in a new Protestant alliance against Louis XIV. On the domestic front, both unions did much to allay English fears of James’s religion and, in particular, a Catholic succession. After all, James was nearly as old as his brother and, since he was thought to be in less robust health, he might never succeed to the throne. Even if he did become king, his reign would be short, followed by that of one of his two Anglican daughters and her Protestant spouse. It was true that, following the death of his first wife, Anne
née
Hyde, duchess of York (b. 1637) in 1671, he had married another young Catholic princess, Mary Beatrice of Modena (1658–1718) in 1673. If Mary Beatrice produced a son, that child would take precedence over James’s female heirs, Mary and Anne. But as the 1670s progressed into the 1680s she experienced a series of obstetrical mishaps that appeared to render this possibility remote. Therefore, a Protestant succession seemed assured in the long run, whatever the short term might bring.

Danby’s second great task was to restore the regime’s financial credit. Though the debts owed before the Stop of the Exchequer were never fully repaid, the new lord treasurer did what he could to cut expenditure and raise revenue. Danby was most successful on the revenue side. He continued the Treasury Commission’s reforms of the Customs, Excise, and Hearth Tax services.
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He also had a stroke of luck. Because the French and the Dutch continued to fight, their share of trade fell to the English who, being neutral, could do business with both sides. As a result, English commerce boomed and the yield from the Customs, in particular, swelled. Still, Charles II’s expenditure continued to outrun his income. Danby’s attempts to restrain the king’s extravagance only made enemies for him among the ravenous army of mistresses and courtiers.

The final recourse open to Danby was to try to persuade the Cavalier Parliament to vote more taxes. We have seen how the lord treasurer tried to win them over by pursuing the Anglican religious and foreign policies described above. He also sought to appeal to both their pride and their pocketbooks by offering court offices, pensions, secret service payments, and favors to peers and MPs, in return for their votes. In short, Danby sought to build up a “court” bloc in Parliament by buying it. Yet, he could never bribe enough members to form a majority; nor is it clear that he could always count on the votes of those on his payroll. He therefore had to rely on his Anglican and reformist policies to convince the remainder.

But there was one group of MPs whom he could never convince. This was made up of old Parliamentarians, many with Roundhead backgrounds and Dissenting sympathies, who eventually came under the leadership of Lord Ashley, now earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was one of those nimble politicians who had managed to serve first Cromwell, then Charles II. After the Cabal’s fall in 1673 he began to organize an opposition to Danby’s government. This opposition criticized court luxury and waste; Danby’s bribery of Parliament; the king’s manipulation of the judiciary, his desire for a standing army and his sympathy with France and Catholicism; the growing influence of the bishops and Church courts; and the resulting persecution of Dissenters. In their view, royal power as wielded by the Danby administration was increasing alarmingly, to the point where it threatened the political and religious constitution of England. In 1677, poet and MP Andrew Marvell (1621–78) charged that “[t]here has now for diverse 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 downright Popery.”
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In making this charge, Shaftesbury’s group claimed to represent “the country,” that is, the true interests and views of the vast majority of the landed aristocracy. In fact, because their views were still associated with republicanism and Civil War violence, the country group was a minority within the political elite, of some influence among London’s merchants and artisans perhaps, but unable to win majorities in the Cavalier Parliament. They needed a more specific, pressing issue in order to prove that they did, indeed, represent the best interests of the political nation at large. In August 1678, they got it.

The Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis, and Loss of Local Control, 1678–81

Toward the end of the summer of 1678, a defrocked preacher named Titus Oates (1649–1705) approached the government with claims of a Catholic plot to kill Charles II, replace him with his brother James, raise English and Irish Catholics against their Protestant neighbors, and bring over a French army to restore Roman Catholicism. To their credit, no one in authority took this story seriously at first. Oates was not exactly a monument of veracity: starting out as an Anabaptist, he was eventually expelled from the Merchant Taylors’ School, two Cambridge colleges, two Anglican livings, the Royal Navy, and, finally, two Jesuit Colleges for a variety of offenses ranging from lying to drunkenness to sodomy! Belief in the Popish Plot only gained momentum because of a series of terrible coincidences. First, James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman (1636–78), was found to have been corresponding secretly with the French court about reestablishing Catholicism. Second, in mid-October the JP who first interrogated Oates, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (1621–78), was found in a ditch run through with his own sword. In fact, the evidence for foul play is ambiguous – Godfrey’s death remains one of the great “murder” mysteries in English history. But coming as it did after these other accusations, his untimely end seemed to contemporaries yet more evidence of a sinister international Catholic plot. Suddenly, people took Oates’s story seriously. Anti-Catholic hysteria flourished. Rumors flew of Catholics secretly arming themselves, of bombs being planted in Protestant churches, of “night riders” – presumably Catholic spies – criss-crossing the country, of French and Spanish troops landing on the coasts. As a result, Catholic houses were searched, Catholics were forbidden the court, London streets were blocked off, and the trained bands and militia called out.

In fact, historians now know that Oates’s plot was a tissue of lies and that the English Catholic community in 1678 was small – about 1 percent of the population – and more apolitical than ever before. But Charles’s subjects could not or would not see this. What they did see was that the Catholic powers, France in particular, were on the march in Europe. As one historian notes, “between 1590 and 1690 protestantism was reduced from one-half to one-fifth of … the continent.”
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They saw popery flourishing at court as never before. Above all, Oates’s charges played brilliantly on a long heritage of anti-Catholic fear and suspicion by recalling the Northern and Ridolfi Plots of 1569–72, the Armada of 1588, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the burning of London of 1666 (which the government had cynically blamed on Catholics), and the machinations of 1670–3. In short, most of the political nation saw the plot as yet one more piece of evidence confirming their worst fears and prejudices. Their response was swift and decisive: prominent Catholics were arrested on charges of high treason and subjected to kangaroo trials in which presiding judges admitted hearsay evidence and ridiculed defense witnesses. (In fact, such badgering was common in treason trials throughout the century.) Overall, some two dozen people were executed either for complicity in the supposed plot or for officiating as priests, which was prosecuted as a capital crime at this time. Even the queen was accused of trying to poison the king, a charge at which Charles II scoffed. But not every unlikely charge proved false: in the third terrible coincidence of 1678, the arch-Anglican and supposedly anti-French earl of Danby was discovered to have written to Louis asking for money so as to avoid recalling Parliament.

The king tried to save his first minister – impeachment might expose the
real
Popish “plot” of his further transactions with Louis XIV – by dissolving Parliament. That was a mistake. Now Shaftesbury and his country group not only had their issue – a Catholic plot against Church and State – but also an election with which to take that issue to the voters of England. They ran on a platform of anti-popery, anti-France, and anti-arbitrary and corrupt government. Ultimately, those agendas collapsed into one: to exclude James, duke of York, from the succession to the throne because he was a Catholic. The next few years have come to be known as the
Exclusion Crisis
, during which three general elections produced three Parliaments. The Exclusion Parliaments would debate whether to alter the hereditary succession or limit the powers of a popish successor. But since these elections were the first in England in almost two decades, they were, in fact, more than a referendum on Exclusion. They put the entire reign on trial. In the course of that trial there emerged two sets of loyalties, based roughly on the country and court groups but coalescing into well-organized, almost modern, political parties: the Whigs and the Tories.

Who were the Whigs? The term “whig” originally meant a Scottish Presbyterian rebel; as this implies, it was bestowed by the party’s enemies. In fact, many Whigs could trace themselves or their ancestry back, through Shaftsbury’s country bloc, to the Parliamentarian rebels of old. The Whigs’ principal policy initiative, the exclusion of York from the throne by act of parliament, implied parliamentary sovereignty over that of the king. Consistent with this, they supported limitations on royal power and opposed the establishment of a standing army. In James’s place, some proposed the king’s eldest and favorite but illegitimate son, James Scott, duke of Monmouth (1649–85). Since Monmouth’s main qualification, besides his dubious lineage, was his Protestantism, it should be obvious that the Whigs were anti-Catholic and, by implication, strongly in favor of Dissenters’ rights and a new Church settlement. In power, they would seek to abolish the Cavalier Code as it applied to Dissenters, while enhancing and enforcing its application to Roman Catholics. Since the Catholic menace was international in scope, they were also anti-French. They saw clearly the danger of Louis’s overarching ambitions. This, in turn, made them natural supporters of William of Orange and the Dutch. Finally, while many Whigs were country gentlemen, their embrace of Dissenters also made them popular with urban dwellers, particularly merchants.

Shaftesbury and the Whigs cultivated this popularity by using many techniques that we associate with political campaigns today. First, they organized. They founded a number of political dining societies, the most famous of which was London’s Green Ribbon Club. At its meetings they planned electoral and parliamentary tactics, propaganda, and street demonstrations. They capitalized on the temporary end of press censorship, producing a torrent of partisan pamphlets and newspapers after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1679 (the number of new titles roughly doubling between 1677–8 and 1680–1). Running through this literature were several radical notions, some of which had not found their way into print since the Interregnum. Clearly, in arguing that Parliament could alter the succession, the Whigs rejected the divine basis of authority. In its place, they revived the supremacy of the common law, or even the old Leveller notion of “the sovereignty of the people,” but with a moderating twist. To most Whig country gentlemen, “the people” did not mean everybody in England but only those who elected and sat in Parliament. However one defined “the people,” all government, even in a monarchy, had its origins in their consent. Since that consent was given so that the government could protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens, Whigs argued that it could be withdrawn in the event that the ruler failed to provide that protection. In this particular case they argued further that consent could be withdrawn upon the accession of a papist: since a Catholic monarch’s allegiance would be outside the country to the pope, there would be no safeguard to life (remember Mary’s burnings, etc.), liberty, property, and so on. For as long as possible, Whigs refused to consider what this would mean if Charles II himself refused to acknowledge the peoples’ fears; that is, few Whigs would, before 1682, admit to themselves that they might, in fact, be justifying rebellion.