Authors: Antonia Fraser
Most famous of all is that remark made to William of Orange,
when Charles observed that Exclusion would make little difference in the end, since if James succeeded to the throne, with his ‘turbulent and excessive temperament’ he would not stay on it four years.
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This judgement has gained prominence for the wrong reason. Because it proved uncannily correct as a prophecy, it is generally held to be illuminating about the character of James
II
. But its real importance lies in the light it casts on Charles
II
. Here was a king who had decided,
faute de mieux
, that he must uphold the principle of the legitimate monarchy; in his usual clear-sighted, if cynical, way, Charles recognized the material he had to deal with in implementing his decision.
The conviction of Charles
II
concerning the need for ‘the descent in the right line’ was based on the present danger to his own monarchy rather than on any future dangers to the monarchy as a whole. He identified attacks on the legitimate succession as part of a campaign which would turn on the royal prerogative, decimate the other wide powers of the Crown, and in general transform the face of English politics. From there, the slippery slope led downwards all the way, via political strife in Parliament to the dreaded abyss of civil war and revolution. Thus ‘descent in the right line’ became closely, almost mystically, linked in the King’s mind with that beneficent order he sought to preserve in his kingdom.
The temperament of Charles
II
as he approached fifty was turning to pessimism. The steel of his youth, that essential quality of public hope which had carried him from Worcester to exile and back to England again, was no longer necessary. Charles
II
’s famous remark about his brother and the future sprang from his own deep-seated conviction of the essential melancholy of human affairs.
The Duke of York, accompanied by Mary Beatrice, sailed for the Netherlands on 3 March. The ostensible reason for his journey was to visit his son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary of Orange.
He left behind him a political scene unpleasantly transformed by the recent General Election. This, which has been described as the first English General Election fought along ‘distinctively
party lines’,
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resulted in a happy triumph for that Country group increasingly identified as the Whigs over those of the Court nicknamed Tories.
fn2
It was also incidentally marked by such heavy drinking on all sides that ‘Sober Societies’ were later formed in towns – an interesting example of locking the stable door after the horse had fully refreshed itself. Far from gaining new adherents, the government did not gain more than thirty seats, against 150 to their opponents. The Crown had miscalculated.
The men who now mustered at Westminster were later described in James’ memoirs as being like ‘so many young Spaniels that run and bark at every lark that springs’. But they were not wholly without a sense of purpose. Quite apart from the subject of Exclusion, there remained the unsettling matter of Danby. The King probably hoped that Danby might be allowed to settle his affairs – and the King’s – and then depart with something like dignity. Danby probably hoped, with Charles’ support, to be able to ride the storm and survive afloat.
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But the ‘young Spaniels’, organized by Shaftesbury, were not content with such a tame solution. The Commons requested Danby’s arrest and the Lords agreed. This of course posed a threat to Danby’s actual safety as well as his ministerial position.
Danby, reluctantly, offered his resignation. On 25 March the King, after assuring the House of Lords that he had authorized the Montagu letters, accepted it. Afterwards Danby blamed the King’s decision on a new man in his counsels: Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland. Originally designated as Montagu’s successor in Paris, Sunderland belonged to the rising generation (he was in his thirties) which would increasingly dominate political events in the last years of the King’s reign. But Sunderland was merely echoing the general feeling of the Court party that Danby had to go.
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Besides, Charles himself could propose no better solution to save Danby than to pardon him for all the offences he had committed up till 27 February.
Even this caused fearful trouble with the House of Commons. As William Sacheverell, the fiery Whig MP, put it, ‘If they confirmed this pardon to Lord Danby, they made the King absolute…. What difference was there between that and arbitrary power?’
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The King insisted. The House of Commons did not budge. In the end, Danby was imprisoned in the Tower. It was now that his treatment of Buckingham the previous year came home to roost. Danby was not even allowed to visit his wife, who was believed to be on her death-bed. Buckingham and his friends had vindictive memories.
The introduction of the First Exclusion Bill was in the King’s opinion a further manifestation of the general attack on his position. When one considers Sacheverell’s sentiments yet again, it is difficult to think the King was wrong. Sacheverell did not take his stand on the need for a Protestant king. ‘Let the King and the Council be as Popish as they will,’ he cried. He took his stand on the far more dangerous point that it did not matter if the King was Popish – so long as ‘we can wind the King to a good will and liking of what we shall do’. In short, ‘The foundation of Government is in the People’s hearts, and upon the same foundation the King came in at his Return….’
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This cut at the very root of the royal position. More to the point, it cut at the root of the practices of a Charles
II
. If the foundation of government was in the people’s hearts, then clearly the monarchy was not the strongest force in the country, for it lay below that of the people, as expressed by Parliament. The appearance of such radical arguments goes far to explain the personal horror Charles
II
felt for Exclusion, over and beyond its consequences in banning his brother from the succession.
For the time being however the Exclusionists were weakened by their own internal disagreements. Exclusion was a comparatively new concept. Essentially it was personal to James: the First Exclusion Bill sought to exclude the Duke of York in particular from ‘the imperial crown of England’ – not any unnamed Catholic successor. But no-one had quite decided how the hand should be played. If James were debarred from
succeeding, the main contenders for the throne were his two daughters: Mary, married to William of Orange, and Anne, as yet unmarried (she was only just thirteen). Then there was ‘the Protestant Duke’– James Duke of Monmouth, still the crowd’s darling, still unlegitimized. All sorts of combinations of these figures would be suggested in months to come; but immediately there was no obvious winning card. Anne’s youth obviously ruled her out, but at this point Mary’s marriage made her equally suspect. For it is important to realize that the Whig attitude to William of Orange in 1679 was quite different from what it subsequently became. By no means did he represent a kind of dream candidate. William was at this point regarded pre-eminently as a Stuart, and as such an authoritarian figure.
Monmouth too was an uncertain quantity. ‘Young Jemmy was a fine lad’ – so ran a popular song. But was he? Sir John Reresby described him as having a fine exterior but not being all of a piece inside, which was probably an accurate assessment. In appearances he had markedly Stuart looks, with that slight heaviness of chin and sensuality of mouth with which many of the members of his family were endowed. But he was undeniably handsome. In character he lacked weight. He could not, for example, conceive of a course of action or an opinion without wishing to give it immediate expression. He had none of the secrecy and substance of his father, the constancy of his uncle the Duke of York. One remembers Evelyn’s charge against his mother, Lucy Walter, that although beautiful she was ‘insipid’: perhaps it was from her that Monmouth derived his own fatal lightness. Or perhaps, more simply, Monmouth was spoiled. ‘So pretty a child’, he had been indulged but not properly educated by his grandmother, Henrietta Maria; that was a dangerous combination.
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Like many exhibitionists, Monmouth was also quite ignorant of other people’s feelings. As Buckingham wrote, he lived ‘as if the world were made only for him’. It was typical of Monmouth that he described his mistress, Henrietta Wentworth, as his wife on the grounds that he had been too young to know what he was doing when he married Anne, the heiress of Buccleuch. As a contemporary wrote, it is ‘a pretence, very airy and absurd’.
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Nell Gwynn, in her witty way, hit off Monmouth’s mixture of royalty and impudence when she christened him Prince Perkin, a nickname which somehow fits him better than the languishing lines of Dryden on the subject of Charles’ children:
Of all this numerous progeny was none
So beautiful, so brave as Absalom.
The King of course loved him – and also spoiled him. But where Charles was concerned, that did not necessarily mean blind, uncritical appreciation. Charles was on the contrary well aware of Monmouth’s instability. As a father, he may have loved him all the more for frailty; as a monarch, he could not help seeing in Monmouth’s flawed character, in particular his lack of judgement and his choice of ‘knaves and flatterers’ as counsellors, another of his own problems.
Monmouth’s sponsors were not put off by his flawed character – nor, for that matter, by what was described as his ‘flawed title’. There was even an argument in favour of choosing a prince thus handicapped: he would take care to govern well, as Lord Howard put it, because he could not dispense with popular support. It was basically Monmouth’s Protestantism which made him attractive to backers in the succession stakes. In the November of 1678, as anti-Catholic prejudice mounted, toasts were drunk to Monmouth, the first real indication of his candidature.
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Even so, in the spring of 1679, his genuine backers were not really very numerous. Shaftesbury, for example, still harped on the idea of the King divorcing the Queen (which, with its implied consequence of a new wife and a new family, was the very reverse of supporting Monmouth).
This was where Monmouth’s lack of acumen hampered him. As he swaggered on the political stage, he could not perceive the obvious fact that his cousins, Mary and Anne, and least of all William of Orange, were hardly likely to support his pretensions. Their reasons were straightforward ones of self-interest. William told Monmouth quite frankly that ‘if he aimed at the crown he could not be his friend, but in all things else he would’.
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The King never supported Monmouth’s pretensions
publicly for a moment.
fn3
Of course, daydreams could and would be spun concerning Charles’ secret intentions. Yet to secure the succession, with so many disadvantages and opponents, Monmouth needed to work like a mole underground. He was however one of nature’s roosters and could not emulate a mole to save his life (as events in the reign of James
II
would show).
Returning to the supporters of Exclusion, it will be seen that their campaign, like Monmouth’s title, was flawed: it had no positive objective as yet, only the negative one of keeping out the Duke of York. Against Exclusion, not only the King but many within Parliament were prepared to argue, as Burnet put it, that ‘it was unlawful in itself, and against the unalterable law of succession (which came to be the common phrase)’.
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Yet even without unity on the part of the Exclusionists, the situation was quite ugly enough for the King. In Parliament he was being pressed on all sides, not simply for or against his brother’s cause. In particular, his faithful servant Lauderdale was being attacked: like the assault on the Duke of York, the campaign smacked of insult to the monarchy.
Lauderdale’s situation, both in England and in Scotland, was acute. In Scotland there had been the predictable outburst after the imposition of taxes for a ‘Highland Host’ to suppress supporters of the Conventicles. Three thousand Lowlanders and six thousand Highlanders neither managed to suppress these spirited Covenanters nor to ensure peace in the troubled land. In England Shaftesbury chose the spring of 1679 to mount a violent attack on Lauderdale’s Scottish regime in the House of Lords. He took it to symbolize the way things were going generally – downhill towards absolutism. On 25 March he described Scotland as ‘the little sister’ of England. The only difference was that in Scotland slavery was to come first, then Popery; in England it was to be the other way round.
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Charles
II
stuck by Lauderdale. He reckoned to be able to protect him, where the discovery of his ‘treasonable’ correspondence had made it impossible to save Danby. In any case,
of the two men, the King felt infinitely more bound to Lauderdale, for reasons of long association and political sympathy.
In Ireland the Test Act had been strictly enforced: Catholics who had crept into the corporations had been hastily eliminated from them and priests proscribed. In Ireland too there was rising tension. Inevitably, Ireland felt the effects of the Popish Plot: where Catholicism was concerned, it was a case of England sneezing and Ireland catching cold.
In 1677 the Duke of Ormonde, Ireland’s best friend where stability and mercy were concerned, was once more put in charge of the country. Despite his disgrace at the hands of the intriguing Buckingham, Ormonde had been kept in touch with Irish affairs by the former Lord Lieutenant, Essex – another example of the latter’s good sense. Ormonde had not achieved the post without a struggle. The nature of it reveals once again the selfish indifference of the English Court – including its King – towards any interests in Ireland other than its own aggrandizement. For there was an opposition manoeuvre to make Monmouth Lord Lieutenant, a post he would however continue to occupy in the salubrious atmosphere of London, while Lord Conway, as Deputy, did the dirty work on the spot. Although this scheme had the support of both Danby and the Duchess of Portsmouth, for internal reasons to do with their own English-based intrigues, Ormonde emerged triumphant.
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