Civil War: The History of England Volume III (68 page)

44

Noise rhymes to noise

When James arrived at his brother’s sickroom in Windsor Castle he fell to his knees, and it is reported that the two men burst into tears. The king had recovered some of his strength and was already out of danger. Yet the two claimants to the throne, the dukes of York and Monmouth, were now in confrontation; each had his own band of supporters, but James for the moment had the upper hand. His sudden return to England had not caused an insurrection, as some had feared, and he had indeed been received with deference; the lord mayor and the aldermen of London, for example, had come to kiss his hand. He did not wish to return to exile in Brussels, and seems to have made it clear that he would leave England only if the duke of Monmouth also made his exit. It was agreed therefore that Monmouth would retire into Holland, out of harm’s way, while James would be dispatched to Edinburgh as a kind of viceroy. He remained there for almost three years.

It had already become clear that, in the election of the summer, the Whigs had won the majority and that those who had voted against the ‘exclusion’ of James were generally turned out of office. Charles refused to allow this parliament to sit, however, and prorogued it to the beginning of the following year, 1680. He told his nephew, William of Orange, that he had no choice in the matter and that otherwise ‘they would have his crown’; he also feared that
the Commons would proceed to the impeachment of his brother and his wife for their Catholic beliefs. Few expected parliament to meet again.

Shaftesbury was discharged from his office as lord president of the new council, and at once entered his true role as leader of the opposition to the court and Crown. Yet he knew well enough that he had no real power unless or until parliament was assembled. The Commons was his praetorian guard. Almost at once, therefore, he planned to launch petitions from all parts of the country for its return. His organization was such that his agents, together with notable local men, went from parish to parish collecting marks and signatures. No one, not even the poorest, was overlooked.

On 17 November the Green Ribbon Club, opposed to Catholics and to the court, organized a great pageant in London in which it was claimed that 200,000 people took part. A variety of Catholic personages were in representation dragged through the streets, and the procession eventually halted in Fleet Street just by the King’s Arms, the headquarters of the club; here effigies of the pope and of the devil, as well as sundry monks, nuns and Jesuits, were hurled into the flames of a fire accompanied by a great shout that, according to a pamphlet, ‘London’s Defiance to Rome’, reached France and Rome ‘damping them all with a dreadful astonishment’. Macaulay remarks in his
History of England
that two words became current at this time, ‘mob’ and ‘sham’.

When the duke of Monmouth arrived in London unexpectedly from exile, he was greeted with bonfires and jubilant crowds as the natural Protestant successor to the throne; he was not so warmly received by his father, however, who told him to be gone from court. His son disobeyed on the grounds that he must stay in order to preserve the life of his father from the designs of the papists.

At the beginning of December 1679, with a party of fifteen other peers, Shaftesbury stopped Charles on his way to the royal chapel and presented him with a petition for the sitting of parliament. The king was so irate that he prorogued the assembly for a further eleven months and issued a proclamation against petitioning itself. His supporters were said to ‘abhor’ the conduct of those who were trying to force the king’s hand; for a while grew up the factions of ‘the Abhorrers’ and ‘the Petitioners’.

After some months of impasse Shaftesbury once more raised the temperature when in the early summer of 1680 he tried to present, to a Middlesex grand jury, the duke of York as a papist and the duchess of Portsmouth, Charles’s mistress, as a prostitute. The latter had already attracted the dislike and suspicion of many, and it had often been suggested that she should be sent packing to France as soon as possible. Shaftesbury’s action was of course an open affront to the king, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion. The king hastened to London from Windsor where he instructed the chief justice, William Scroggs, to dismiss the grand jury before it heard any evidence for the charges. The damage had been done, however, compounded by the fact that Shaftesbury received no rebuke.

When parliament finally met, towards the end of October, the Commons was full from the very first session. The king’s ministers, known as ‘the chits’ because of their relative youth, had formulated what they hoped was a consistent policy; they intended to defuse the threat of exclusion by imposing limitations on the power of a future King James, and to seek an alliance with the United Provinces against the French. It was still important to signal hostility to Louis XIV, even though Charles had been engaged in constant negotiations to obtain money from him.

The Whigs were not to be averted from their purpose, however, and at the beginning of November a second Exclusion Bill against the duke of York was introduced. It received its third reading within nine days and was then sent up to the Lords. The duke of Monmouth came back to London from a triumphal tour of the West Country in order to participate in the discussions.

The king also attended this long session of the peers, from eleven in the morning to nine at night, and listened to them with eager attention. It had been believed that he would abandon his brother, however reluctantly, for the sake of public peace; he was known to fear, more than anything else, the outbreak of another civil war. But in fact he remained firm and made his feelings known during the course of the Lords’ debate. When Monmouth expressed his concern for his father, Charles called out, ‘It is a Judas kiss that he gives me!’ The sentiments of the king may have helped to concentrate the minds of the Lords. They voted, sixty-three to thirty, against the Exclusion Bill. Shaftesbury’s measure had failed.

It was hoped that the Commons might now suggest a compromise upon which both sides might agree, but no possibility of a middle way existed. The Commons passed a series of resolutions aimed at the exclusion of the duke of York; they stated that no supply of money could be voted under the circumstances, that the councillors of the king should be removed from public employment, and that any man who lent money to the king should be called to the bar of parliament. The king was advised to prorogue parliament once again and the Commons, speedily warned of this threat, met early on the morning of 10 January 1681, to vote that anyone who offered such advice was a traitor to the king and to the realm. The king therefore issued a proclamation dissolving parliament, and ordering that a new assembly should meet in Oxford within two months.

This aroused anger, resentment and no little anxiety among Shaftesbury and his followers. Oxford was known to be the most royalist of all English cities. They would have been even more concerned if they had learned that Louis XIV had proffered another bribe to the king. Louis offered to grant him an annual pension, larger than anything parliament would provide, as long as he refrained from joining in any attack upon France by Spain or others. A ban on French imports was also allowed to expire. Nothing was put in writing, and no signatures were required; it was simply a verbal agreement, mediated by envoys, between the two kings.

The new parliament, meeting on 21 March 1681, was no more willing than its predecessor to come to any agreement. Charles appeared before the two houses with a compromise. If James ever became king, his powers would be transferred to a regent. In the first instance that regent would be James’s older daughter, Mary, princess of Orange, a Protestant; and, in the event of her decease, the regency would devolve upon his other Protestant daughter, Anne. This seemed on the face of it an eminently sensible arrangement, but the Commons refused to accept it. Instead it debated a third Exclusion Bill. Charles in fact seems genuinely to have wished for an agreement in the calmer atmosphere of Oxford, no less for the fact that he feared another civil war. That was another reason for his secret alliance with the French king; he might need men as well as money.

On 28 March, Charles, with his full regalia concealed in a covered sedan chair, proceeded to the Lords, who were sitting in the Geometry School of Oxford. He was about to spring a surprise. He appeared before the Lords in his ordinary clothes, but then he ordered his attendants to dress him in robe and crown. Thus attired he summoned the Commons. ‘My lords and gentlemen,’ he said to the two houses, ‘all the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end, when the divisions at the beginning are such: therefore, my lord chancellor, do as I have commanded you.’ He now told his opponents, to their faces, that they had been dissolved and must disperse. He left Oxford immediately, and they had no choice but to follow. It was reported that ‘the king’s breath scattered them like leaves in autumn’.

Charles now believed that he could survive without any parliamentary funds. His pension from France, and the raising of customs revenue from luxury French imports now freely admitted, would grant him room to manoeuvre; his household expenditure had in any case been considerably reduced. He had decided to embark upon a period of personal rule without an opposition to divert or trouble him. In this respect the king was greatly assisted by what seemed to be a resurgence of loyalty towards the Stuart monarchy. The intransigence of Shaftesbury and his followers, in rejecting what seemed to be a just and sensible offer on the matter of the regency, could be contrasted with the moderation of the king. They had wanted to bully him into submission, but he had remained firm. He had resisted any attempt to alter the natural succession because it was repugnant to his conscience and to the laws of England. That is how the abortive Oxford parliament could be represented.

In his declaration ‘to all his loving subjects, touching the causes and reasons that moved him to dissolve the last two parliaments’ he stated that ‘we assure ourself that we shall be assisted by the loyalty’ of those ‘who consider the rise and progress of the late troubles’. The ‘late troubles’ were the divisions that had led to the civil wars. ‘And we cannot but remember that religion, liberty and property were all lost and gone when monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that was restored.’ He appealed, therefore, to the instincts of loyalty and stability that maintained the traditions of the nation.

He now turned his fury upon Shaftesbury and his allies who, with no likelihood of a parliament, began to lose strength as well as purpose. Charles was determined to exclude them from all public offices; he decided to remove them from the judicial bench and from the administration of the towns. Sixty members of parliament who had voted for exclusion were removed from nomination as justices of the peace. Some of the lords-lieutenant of the counties were dismissed, together with the lowlier recorders and town clerks. Since the nonconformists had played a large role in the opposition, the laws against dissenters were executed with more rigour; they, rather than Roman Catholics, were increasingly consigned to prison. One contemporary said that it was a form of civil war, with the law replacing the sword.

At the beginning of July 1681 Shaftesbury was taken into custody and brought before the king and council where he was accused of treason; the earl denied the charge but was in any case committed to the Tower. Yet there was a flaw in the royal project. Shaftesbury had a residence at Aldersgate, and so his case came within the jurisdiction of the City. London was still in the hands of those who opposed the court; it was still, for the king, enemy territory.

When the earl’s case was heard in the Old Bailey, therefore, the grand jury was packed with prominent Whigs; the foreman had in fact been an exclusionist member of parliament. It was perhaps inevitable that a verdict of
ignoramus
– ‘we do not know’ – was given and Shaftesbury acquitted. Four days later he applied for bail and the king’s son, the duke of Monmouth, offered to act as his surety. He was released and, that night, the streets rang out with the cries ‘A Monmouth! A Shaftesbury!’ In many places, however, a Whig demonstration was countermanded by a Tory manifestation; or, as Sir Roger L’Estrange put it in his
Observator
, ‘Noise rhymes to Noise, and Noise must be opposed to Noise’.

Two days after the verdict had been given the king launched an investigation into London’s charter, asking ‘
quo warranto
’ or by what warrant did the City enjoy the corporate privileges that it claimed; it was a protracted and expensive procedure, replete with formal and legal niceties, which could easily be turned against the City corporation. Any pretext could be found or concocted by the
court lawyers to justify a forfeiture. It was easier and less expensive to ask for a new charter, but this in turn might give the king power to remove ‘disaffected’ members of the corporation. It was a device that Charles had already been using to great effect.