Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (25 page)

Parliamentarians and Puritans now saw a pressing need to exclude the King’s popish brother from the succession, and the bitter
battle to impose this‘exclusion’ on Charles
produced rudimentary political parties. Campaigning for exclusion was a country’ alliance of Puritans, populists and old parliamentary
diehards — derided by their opponents as‘Whiggamores’, a term of abuse for Scottish Presbyterian outlaws. In response, the’Whigs’
denounced the court’ party of High Anglicans and loyal monarchists as’Tories’ (from the Gaelic word
toraighe
— an Irish label for Catholic bandits).

Outlaws versus bandits, Whigs versus Tories: thus, in mutual insult, was born the British two-party political system. By the
early 1680s the rival groupings were proudly proclaiming their names, printing manifestos, financing newspapers and choosing
candidates. They even issued coloured rosettes — red for Tories and true blue for Whigs — and in this, the first of their
many great confrontations, the Whigs managed to build up the larger majorities in the House of Commons.

But though the Whigs had the votes, they found themselves helpless in face of the King’s prerogative powers, which were still
essentially those enjoyed by Charles I — it was as if Commonwealth, Protectorate and Restoration had never been. Whenever
the Whigs got close to passing a bill that would exclude James, his brother dissolved Parliament, and after three bitterly
debated sessions and three dissolutions, the exclusion crisis ran out of steam. The fabrications of Titus Oates were exposed,
and for the last five years of his reign Charles II was able to rule without Parliament.

The King’s guiding principle had always been that he‘did not wish to go again on his travels’, and through charm, deceit and
a general unwillingness on the part of his subjects to fight another Civil War, he succeeded. Charles II never had
to climb another oak tree or blacken his face with soot again. On his deathbed, he called for a priest and formally converted
to the faith of his childhood. But as the Merry Monarch headed for his Catholic heaven, his farewell words paid due homage
to his licentious past —‘Let not poor Nelly starve’.

J
AMES
,
DUKE OF MONMOUTH
,
WAS CHARLES
II’s eldest and favourite son, the product of his first serious love affair — in 1649, with Lucy Walter, an attractive, dark-eyed
Englishwoman living in Paris. This was the year of Charles I’s execution, and it was later recounted that the nineteen-year-old
prince, suddenly and tragically King in-exile, fell so deeply in love with Lucy that he secretly married her.

Charles always denied that Lucy was his legitimate wife, but he showed great favour to his handsome firstborn, awarding him
the dukedom — the highest rank of aristocracy — when the boy was only fourteen, and arranging his marriage
to a rich heiress. Sixteen years later, in 1679, Charles entrusted him with the command of an English army sent to subdue
Scottish rebels, and the thirty-year-old returned home a conquering hero.

As the exclusion crisis intensified, the Whigs embraced Monmouth as their candidate for the throne — here was a dashing‘Protestant
Duke’ to replace the popish James — and Monmouth threw himself into the part. He embarked on royal progresses, currying popular
favour by taking part in village running races, and even touching scrofula sufferers for the King’s Evil (see
Great Tales,
vol. 1,
p. 81
). But Charles was livid at this attempt by his charming but bastard son to subvert the line of lawful succession.
He twice issued proclamations reasserting Monmouth’s illegitimacy.

The transition of rule from Charles to James II in February 1685 was marked by a widespread acceptance — even a warmth — that
had seemed impossible in the hysterical days of the Popish Plot.‘Without forswearing his Catholic loyalties, James pledged
that he would‘undertake nothing against the religion [the Church of England] which is established by law’, and most people
gave him the benefit of the doubt. At the relatively advanced age of fifty-two, the new King cut a competent figure, reassuringly
more serious and hardworking than his elder brother.

But Monmouth, in exile with his Whig clique in the Netherlands, totally misjudged the national mood. On II June that year
he landed at the port of Lyme Regis in Dorset with just eighty-two supporters and equipment for a thousand more. Though his
promises of toleration for dissenters drew the support of several thousand West Country artisans
and labourers, the local gentry raised the militia against him, and the duke was soon taking refuge in the swamps of Sedgemoor
where King Alfred had hidden from the Vikings eight hundred years earlier. Lacking Alfred’s command of the terrain, however,
Monmouth got lost in the mists during an attempted night attack, and as dawn broke on 6 July his men were cut to pieces.

Nine days later the‘Protestant Duke’ was dead, executed in London despite grovelling to his victorious uncle and offering
to turn Catholic in exchange for his life. It was a sorry betrayal of the Somerset dissenters who had signed up for what would
prove the last popular rebellion in English history — and there was worse to come. Not content with the slaughter of Sedgemoor
and the summary executions of those caught fleeing from the field, James insisted that a judicial commission headed by the
Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, should go down to the West Country to root out the last traces of revolt.

Travelling with four other judges and a public executioner, Jeffreys started his cull in Winchester, where Alice Lisle, the
seventy-year-old widow of the regicide Sir John Lisle, was found guilty of harbouring a rebel and condemned to be burned at
the stake. When Jeffreys suggested that she might plead to the King for mercy, Widow Lisle took his advice — and was spared
burning to be beheaded in the marketplace. Moving on to Dorchester on 5 September, Jeffreys was annoyed to be confronted by
a first batch of thirty suspects all pleading‘not guilty’: he sentenced all but one of them to death. Then, in the interests
of speed, he offered
more lenient treatment to those pleading‘guilty’. Out of 233, only eighty were hanged.

By the time the work of the Bloody Assizes was finished, 480 men and women had been sentenced to death, 260 whipped or fined,
and 850 transported to the colonies, where the profits from their sale were enjoyed by a syndicate that included James’s wife,
Mary of Modena. The tarred bodies and heads pickled in vinegar that Judge Jeffreys distributed around the gibbets of the West
Country were less shocking to his contemporaries than they would be to subsequent generations. But his Bloody Assizes did
raise questions about the new Catholic King, and how moderately he could be trusted to use his powers.

T
HOSE WHO DISLIKED ENGLAND HAVING AN
openly Catholic monarch took comfort from the thought that James II could not live for even The King was comparatively old
by seventeenth-century standards — in October 1687 he turned fifty-four, the age at which his brother had died — and his immediate
heirs, his daughters Mary (twenty-five) and Anne (twenty-three), were both staunch Protestants. Mary, indeed, was married
to the Dutch Protestant hero William of Orange, who had his own place in the English succession (see family tree p. xi), and
who was leading Holland’s battle against the empire-building ambitions of Catholic France. (The’Orange’ in William’s title
referred
to the French town near Avignon that had once belonged to his family.)

Mary and Anne were the surviving offspring of James’s first marriage, to Anne Hyde, the daughter of Charles II’s adviser in
exile, Edward Hyde. Following her death in 1671 James had married an Italian Catholic, Mary, daughter of the Duke of Modena,
and the couple had worked hard to produce a Catholic heir — Mary of Modena went through ten pregnancies in the decade 1674-84.
But these had produced five stillbirths and five who died in infancy, so by the time James II came to the throne, Protestants
could safely feel that his wife’s reproductive capacity posed them no threat.

They had not reckoned on the visits that Queen Mary started making to the ancient city of Bath with its curative spa waters,
and just before Christmas 1687 came alarming news — the Bath fertility treatment had worked. Mary of Modena was pregnant for
an eleventh time, and early in June 1688, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Named James and styled Prince of Wales, this
new arrival displaced his Protestant sisters from the succession and suddenly offered England the prospect of a Catholic Stuart
monarchy in perpetuity.

English Protestants refused to believe James’s luck — the birth had to be a fake. Pamphlets were rushed out asserting that
the strapping baby was a miller’s son, smuggled into the royal bed in a long-handled warming-pan. Vivid graphic images circulated,
showing how the deception must have been carried out, and it was in vain that the King marshalled a chamberful of respected
Protestant witnesses to swear to
the genuineness of the birth. The story of the‘baby in the warming-pan’ proved one of history’s most persuasive conspiracy
theories.

After three years on the throne, James was arousing widespread suspicion. He had promised not to undermine the established
Church, but evidence was mounting that his true purpose was to steer England back towards Rome. By March 1688 a succession
of moves favouring Catholics and dissenters had ousted more than twelve hundred members of the Church of England from public
office, and though James claimed to be unbiased, even his own family dismissed as a popish ploy his recently cultivated tolerance
towards nonconformists.’Things are come to that pass now,’ wrote his daughter Anne from London to her elder sister in Holland,’that
if they go on much longer, I believe no Protestant will be able to live.’

James was knocking the stilts from under his own conservative powerbase. The Anglican Tory squires who had welcomed his accession
were incensed to see their own kind being replaced on the magistrates’ benches by papists and Puritans — and seriously alarmed
when Catholics were given positions of command in the King’s rapidly growing standing army. On 30 June, less than three weeks
after the birth of the Prince of Wales, seven senior peers, their signatures in code, sent a secret invitation to Mary’s husband
William of Orange to come over to England.

William needed no prompting. He spent that summer preparing an army and an invasion fleet — 463 vessels and forty thousand
troops — along with sixty thousand pamphlets to explain his purpose. He did not intend to seize the
crown, he said. His expedition was‘intended for no other design, but to have a free and lawful parliament assembled as soon
as possible — and to inquire, among other matters,‘into the birth of the pretended Prince of Wales’.

William’s Dutch and German invasion force was larger than Philip of Spain had assembled for the Armada of 1588, but when the
Dutch prince landed in Torbay in November a hundred years later, his success was by no means guaranteed. His foreign mercenaries
might well have it in them to defeat the twenty-thousand-strong English army that was blocking their way to London. But shedding
English blood would have ruined William’s claim to be acting in English interests, and would also have exposed his basic reason
for invading England — he wanted England’s military might on Holland’s side in its ongoing battle against Louis XIV.

William was fortunate that, at the moment of confrontation, James lost his nerve. Though debilitated by nosebleeds and insomnia,
the King made haste to join his army on Salisbury Plain — only to return abruptly to London, where he discovered that his
daughter Anne had deserted and joined the cause of her sister and brother-in-law. Lear-like, James raged against the perfidy
of his daughters. Having sent the Queen and the Prince of Wales ahead of him, he fled Whitehall on II December by a secret
passage, throwing the Great Seal of England petulantly into the Thames as he left.