King Charles II (74 page)

He now tried to sort out what was undoubtedly the curse of Ireland at the time: the incredibly complicated situation with regard to land titles. This was the product of forty years of settlement and counter-settlement, larded over with unfortunate grants made by the English Crown, often quite ignorantly. Clare and Connaught were in a particular state of chaos. After all, if Charles
II
placated his suitors with grants of land which actually had lawful occupants already, he was not likely to feel the consequences personally. It was not incidentally that Charles acted more selfishly towards Ireland than the rest of his contemporaries. Like Cromwell in the previous generation, with his ferocious genocidal victories, Charles merely personified the English attitude of his time. But the result was ‘a mere scramble’.
⁴³

A second problem facing Ormonde was that of law and order. The brigands – the original Tories – continued to multiply. Characteristically, Ormonde tackled both the land question and the rising anarchy with measures designed to cast a mantle of forgiveness over the past. The legislation he proposed included a Bill of Oblivion. There was considerable opposition to Ormonde’s plans, some of it comprehensible, since obviously some interlopers might find themselves confirmed in their titles.

It was in this sense that the Popish Plot, naming the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Peter Talbot, and potentially smearing all Catholics, came at an awkward time. Shaftesbury was only too easily able to play on folk memories of the ‘massacre’ of 1641 by suggesting that there would be another Irish insurrection. It is hardly likely that the Irish off-shoot plot for a French invasion ever existed, any more than the alleged conspiracies of the English Catholic Lords; it was correctly described later by Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, as being ‘all plain Romance’. Nevertheless, as in England there were casualties. Archbishop Talbot died in prison in Dublin late in 1678, and about the same time Plunkett was arrested. Plunkett was a man of the greatest probity, of whom nothing worse could be said than that he had not left Ireland when the Catholic hierarchy was officially banished: yet a charge of high treason was later fabricated against him. Since it proved impossible to find an Irish jury to convict him, two years later this particular witch-hunt was destined to move to England – the land of more amenable jurymen, where a Catholic prelate was concerned – with scandalous results.

Meanwhile, in England the summer of 1679 seemed unlikely to provide a happy resolution from the King’s point of view. Danby was gone, leaving no obvious successor. The trial of Sir George Wakeman, with possible injury to the Queen, was pending. Parliament was sitting and about to debate the Exclusion Bill. The King as usual lacked money. Popular prejudice had, if anything, heightened since the previous autumn. It is true that Catholics were not actually being torn to pieces by the mob – a negative achievement – but the atmosphere of hysteria was such that no-one, whatever their allegiance, could be
confident such a thing would not happen. A satire on ‘Affairs of State’ demanded:

Would you send Kate to Portugall

Great James to be a Cardinall …?

This is your Time.

Would you send confessors to tell

Powis, Stafford and Arundell,

they must prepare their souls for hell?

This is your Time.
⁴⁴

It was certainly the time of Titus Oates. In April he was able to postulate publicly such extraordinary fantasies as the fact that James
I
had been murdered, that the Great Rebellion and the death of Charles
I
were due to the Jesuits, and that the Duke of York had started the Great Fire! Useless to suggest that no sane person could believe such mad perversions of reason and common-sense – when popular prejudice is aflame, the very madness of such tales brings with it an orgiastic release to hearers: the greater the madness, the greater the satisfaction.

A famous pamphlet of the time – a best-seller – is a classic illustration of this. Protestant citizens were adjured to go to the top of the Monument in the City and imagine the consequences of Popish rule:

the whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of [being] heretic dogs. And, tied to a stake in the midst of the flames, they were to picture themselves their fathers or their mothers screaming out to God with hands and eyes uplifted to heaven.
⁴⁵

What chance did the real Catholics – obscure, oppressed people – stand against this dramatic image?

In its deliberate excitation of the most basic fears in every human breast, this is the language of the rabble-rouser down
the ages. Sir John Reresby wrote afterwards of ‘the Torrent of the Times’ that no one who had not actually witnessed them could conceive ‘what a Ferment that raised among all Ranks and Degrees’.
⁴⁶
But those who have lived through similar periods of irrational persecution, that of the ‘Reds’ in Macarthyite America, for example, can imagine them quite well.

Related afterwards, the actual events which took place might not amount to much in terms of massacre or the kind of mayhem which chills the blood centuries later. If the innocent died, they died after due – if not fair – trial. But it was an atmosphere in which rational decision and steady action were, if not impossible, exceptionally difficult. No-one knew what the next day would bring, whether they were a Catholic fearing slaughter, or a righteous Englishman fearing the assassination of the ruler, followed by armed insurrection. The predatory Shaftesbury, blowing his hunting-horn to encourage the Whigs, added both to the excitement and to the confusion.

Charles
II
maintained his balance by firm adherence to twin principles – for the Queen and against Exclusion.

1
J. P. Kenyon,
The Popish Plot
, London, 1972, contains an excellent summary of the various theories in the light of recent research (Appendix A, ‘The Murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’).

2
As the Tories took – or rather received – their name from Irish brigands, the Whigs were dubbed after the Whiggamores, Scottish Presbyterian rebels. (The word was originally spelt ‘Whigg’.)

3
According to Evelyn, Monmouth admitted on the scaffold that Charles
II
had ‘indeed told him he was but his base [illegitimate] son’.
³⁹

So I have seen a King at Chess

(His Queens and Bishops in distress)

Shifting about, growing less and less

With here and there a pawn.

A
n unacknowledged deadlock existed between Charles
II
and his Parliament after the fall of Danby in March 1679. There was no obvious candidate to replace Danby as chief minister, one who would both be acceptable to the King and succeed in managing Parliament. The King listened to the advice of Sir William Temple. It might be that the time had come for a political experiment. He now instituted a new type of Council, consisting of thirty members, half of whom were to be ministers and half without office (Temple himself was a member).

It was an intelligent move. Such a choice had the desirable effect – from the King’s point of view – of promoting discord between those who were selected and those who were not.
¹
At the same time, it was the intention of this Council to transform poachers, such as Shaftesbury and Lord Halifax, into gamekeepers. The distinction between these two professions was not necessarily so rigid: unlike most poachers, Shaftesbury and Halifax had been gamekeepers once upon a time. Halifax, member of a great Yorkshire family and endowed with even greater brilliance of intellect, had been made a Privy Councillor in 1672; he had supported the Test Act. Although Halifax accepted the authenticity of the Popish Plot, where James was
concerned he did not take a hard line. Halifax stood more for the limitation of James’ powers than for his total Exclusion.

The other members of this Council, trainee gamekeepers, included Sunderland and Laurence Hyde – ‘Lory’. Like Sunderland, he was in his thirty-ninth year, eleven years younger than his master. He had been a diplomat (accredited to The Hague) as well as an MP; he was made one of the new Lords of the Treasury in March 1679, when Danby fell. Hyde had inherited from his father, the once mighty Clarendon, a certain arrogance. But he had also inherited Clarendon’s great loyalty towards the monarchy. Hyde was considered personally close to the Duke of York and, although he regretted James’ Catholicism, was against Exclusion.

Then there was Sidney Godolphin, in his early thirties, another Lord of the Treasury appointed in March. Since 1668 he had been an MP, first for Helston and later for St Mawes, and he had included a variety of royal appointments in his career: page of honour (when Charles described him as never
in
the way and never
out
of it), groom of the bedchamber and finally in 1678, Master of the Robes.
²
But he also had close Dutch contacts and disliked the Duke of York. The junior member of the group was the Earl of Mulgrave, barely thirty. One of the Wits and Dryden’s noble patron, Mulgrave had also been a naval commander; he was now colonel of the ‘Old Holland’ regiment of foot. Mulgrave preferred the Duke of York to Monmouth, for whom he had felt a military jealousy.

From their youth, these men were to be known as ‘the Chits’. A mark of this generation in 1679 was a capacity to remain on friendly terms with Shaftesbury and his associates, as well as with the Court, where their natural interests lay, unless there was some specific and dangerous issue. Indeed, there is a fluidity about the stance of men like Sunderland and Godolphin which echoes the generally confused political alliances of this period.

The new Treasury commission after Danby’s fall was however headed by a figure of greater maturity: the Earl of Essex, recently returned from his spell as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. At the new Treasury it was felt that Essex’s ‘clear, though slow sense’ would make him ‘very acceptable to the King’.
³
Indeed, Essex’s
instinctive moderation was illustrated only a few months later, when he advised the King to disband his newly raised Guards, as being unnecessarily provocative.

Later Essex favoured Exclusion. And even the wise Essex would lose his head, believing in such a far-fetched notion as the guilt of the aged Lord Stafford, and involving himself in the Rye House Plot. But at the time when the King’s experimental Council was formed, the employment of a man like Essex, coupled with Shaftesbury, Halifax and the younger men, represented a positive decision to try and break the deadlock which existed between King and Parliament: a deadlock which had virtually brought government to a halt. The plan was that this Council should transact all business, and for reasons of convenience it was therefore divided into committees for Intelligence, Ireland, Tangier and Trade and Plantations.

It is true that as this perturbed spring turned into a still more hectic summer, the King tended to lean more and more on those members of this Council who were sound on the subject of the royal prerogative. But this was inevitable, given that the prerogative was under renewed attack, and given the King’s anxieties on the subject. The rise of the influence of Essex, Hyde and Godolphin was not implicit in the constitution of the Council when it was first formed; nor is it necessary to suppose that Charles
II
formed the Council in a derisive mood, as a kind of blind to his real activities. The formation of the Council was an intelligent move in its own right, because it stood to bring strident members of the opposition within the nullifying orbit of the government. As a pragmatic operator, the King would have been perfectly content had the Council succeeded. In any case, the burning issue of Exclusion, filling Parliament with both smoke and fire, was occupying all his positive energies.

On 29 April, as an effort against Exclusion, the King agreed to considerable limitations on the powers of any ‘Popish’ successor. These included lack of control over judicial or ecclesiastical appointments (a limitation which would put this Popish sovereign in a very weak position indeed, compared with his predecessors). Parliament was also to assemble immediately on the death of the sovereign, as of right – another important
sacrifice of the royal prerogative. It was not enough. Shaftesbury and his clique continued to demand the sacrifice of James. Thus the Exclusion Bill was given its first reading and carried.

On 21 May it was also carried on the second of its three necessary readings, before going to the Lords. The majority was large, without being overwhelming (207 to 128, and there were over 170 people who did not vote). The Commons was not however likely to be in great haste to accord the Bill its third reading, since relations with the House of Lords were still in that state of nagging discord which is an important political feature of this period. Once they had passed the Bill finally, the Lords would probably reject it. The King therefore, as an experienced general, fell back on the tried weapon of prorogation. On 27 May he prorogued Parliament until 14 August.