Authors: Antonia Fraser
Both Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were arrested; Lord Grey of Werke escaped. The latter was a zealous Exclusionist and an avowed supporter of Monmouth. His private life was as colourful as that of some of the Wits: he had eloped with his sister-in-law and was tried for the offence. William Russell, the Whig aristocrat who intrigued with the Catholic Louis
XIV
as and when it suited his own best interests, had seconded the Exclusion Bill in March 1681. Algernon Sidney, the proud self-confessed republican or ‘Commonwealthsman’, as he significantly termed himself, had only narrowly escaped condemnation as a regicide in 1660. After wanderings abroad he had just returned to England in time to plague the King with his joyous support of Exclusion in 1677.
A colleague whose implication in the plot deeply distressed the King was Essex, once his serious and respected minister. Essex committed suicide. The King exclaimed that he would not have demanded his death when he heard the news.
‘I owed him a life!’ he said, referring to the execution of Essex’s father, the Royalist hero Arthur Capel, thirty years before.
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The existence of the plot was only discovered officially at the beginning of June. It was convenient timing. As with the alleged plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, so deftly handled by Walsingham, the sovereign’s life was wonderfully preserved without having been actually endangered. Popular sympathy was however in proportion to the peril averted rather than the ordeal endured. From Holland, William of Orange hastened to send his own favourite, Bentinck, with a message of congratulations to his uncles on their joint escape. It is highly unlikely that he had been implicated in the plot himself;
26
but he was personally embarrassed by the presence of certain of the escaped conspirators in Holland, and wished to make the point of his continued Stuart loyalties.
Of those actively participating, Monmouth assuredly fared the best. The King himself took the line that Monmouth’s involvement
was, like his personality, showy without being deep. In July a Grand Jury found against Monmouth and a reward was offered for his capture. However, nothing too energetic was done to secure this. Monmouth was allowed to skulk in hiding at the home of his mistress Henrietta Wentworth (she to whom he considered himself married in the eyes of God), while the other conspirators were subjected to trial. At the instigation of Halifax, the King was soon prepared to stretch out his arms to his errant son once more. Monmouth’s wife, Duchess Anne, also wrote piteously in his favour: ‘So I hope your Majesty will not refuse to accept any of that entire submission and great penitence from him, which your goodness would not perhaps deny to another man.’
27
In view of Monmouth’s behaviour as a husband, it was indeed gracious behaviour on her part.
At first the King received Monmouth with displeasure: but to observers it was ‘the displeasure of a parent who seeks the reformation of his child’. The trouble was that Monmouth did not give much genuine proof of this reformation. Although he wrote two penitent letters (probably drawn up by Halifax), he jibbed at any further confession concerning his associates.
28
Monmouth was also determined that his recantation should not be made public. The King however was disgusted that his generosity should be met by quibbling. Monmouth was not allowed to get away with his partial submission. Eventually he flounced off to the Continent, where William of Orange took the opportunity to stir the pot – and stir up family trouble – by entertaining him.
This new toughness towards Monmouth has been ascribed to the Duke of York.
29
Yet as indulged children learn to their cost, even the mildest parent may reach a turning-point. In his heart of hearts the King probably loved his spoiled son as much as ever. In 1682 a play by Nathaniel Lee,
The Duke of Guise
, had been banned because it was rated an attack on Monmouth: it was remarked at the time that ‘though his Majesty’s pleasure is to be dissatisfied and angry with the Duke of Monmouth yet he is not willing that others should abuse him out of natural affection for him’. Nevertheless, the King had been cut to the quick by Monmouth’s defiant action in going bail for his avowed
enemy Shaftesbury. Immediately afterwards, at the launching of a ship at Deptford, he was seen to be ‘very serious and more concerned than the greatest business did usually make him’.
30
By 1683 Charles
II
, sadly profiting by experience, had decided that there was no peace while Monmouth was around. That progress the previous year would have been interpreted as a rebellion in a jumpier age; the Tudors, for example, would have made short work of a claimant to the throne who gallivanted around the country accompanied by an armed retinue, showing himself gorgeously to the people. Money, the parent’s panacea, was not withheld for ever. The next year Monmouth was granted an annuity of £6,000 a year. But a lawful return from the Continent was denied to him.
The truth was that both Monmouth’s personality and his position were against him. One of James’ biographers has suggested that he might have quoted to his brother about this time the words of Prince Hal to Henry
IV
:
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My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me…
Had James done so, Charles
II
would have respected the sentiment. So long as Monmouth was allowed to parade or intrigue in England, he ever served as a magnet to draw towards him the forces of dissent; and he lacked within himself the strength to resist such temptations.
As it was, Monmouth left behind him an uncle triumphant in the shape of the Duke of York. For James himself was now popularly felt to be a wronged man: he stood for the old values of monarchy and strength. When some Scholars of St Paul’s School (headed by Lord Dartmouth’s son) thanked the Duke of York for getting them a ‘Play Day’ (by Colet’s statutes only to be granted by the sovereign or an ecclesiastic), James genially told their ‘very Master to be careful to teach them their duty to the Church and Crown’. The very existence of the Rye House conspirators proved these bulwarks were under attack.
The glory of the British line
Old Jimmy’s come again!
So ran a song of the time. Burnet commented angrily on the ‘indecent courting and magnifying’ of the Duke of York which took place.
32
Demonstrations of joy began to greet his appearances, similar to those which greeted Monmouth, but in direct opposition to them.
The King seized the hour: ‘It is plain that an Handle was taken from that Discovery – i.e., of the Plot, to let in the Duke of York,’ wrote a contemporary.
33
A declaration of 28 July 1683 gave the King’s official view of the recent plot and his escape: ‘Divine Providence which hath preserved us through the whole course of our life, hath at this time, in an extraordinary manner, showed itself in the wonderful and gracious deliverance of us, and our dearest brother, and all our loyal subjects, from this horrid and damnable conspiracy.’ On 9 September a public Thanksgiving Day was held for the King’s lucky escape. But Divine Providence had done even better than the King admitted. Once the uncovering of plots had cast the English nation into a state of neurotic panic on the subject of Popery. Now, as the State Papers plenteously reveal, plots were used to justify measures of repression. Monmouth may have been treated with mercy: Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were not.
It is doubtful whether these conspirators had actually done much more than talk among themselves – albeit treasonable talk. Both Russell and Sidney admitted that they had declared it was lawful to resist the King on occasion, while denying they had converted words into deeds. But in their different ways they represented the elements most resented by the King in the Whig faction.
Russell’s trial in July, presided over by Pemberton, did at least conform to the rules of justice at the time: Roger North in his autobiography cited it as an example of the fairness then to be found in English courts. Russell was executed, despite the intercession of his family and Louise Duchess of Portsmouth (who was paid to do so); pleas were even addressed to Louis
XIV
, via Barrillon, to save him – but in vain. When George
Legge gave a list of reasons for leniency, the King replied tersely: ‘All that is true, but it is as true that if I do not take his life he will soon have mine.’ The King was also said to have cast ‘a sarcastical eye’ towards the trial of Lord Stafford when Russell was condemned to a simple beheading; far more barbarous penalties had been demanded for Stafford and only commuted on the King’s edict. Charles listened to Bishop Burnet’s account of Russell’s death in silence.
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The same fairness was not exhibited towards Sidney in November. In the interval between the two trials Saunders had been replaced by Jeffreys as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, as part of the reorganization of the judiciary. (Jeffreys had merely prosecuted Russell, not presided.) Jeffreys interrupted Sidney in a shocking manner; while his loaded summing-up brought no credit either to him or the royal system which had introduced him to the office. Sidney died on 7 December; according to the Duke of York, he met his end ‘very stoutly and like a true republican’ – the ungrudging admiration of one iron man for another.
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Sidney protested the illegality of his trial, but declared that all the same he was prepared to die for the ‘old cause’ – the Commonwealth –fighting for which he had spent his youth.
The situation in Europe did not remain as stable as the English, otherwise engaged, might have hoped. Charles
II
had more than ever a strong motive for desiring European peace. The aggressive martial policies of Louis
XIV
continued to threaten the United Provinces – that he could bear; but the potential threat to his own French set-up was another matter. If Louis showed himself all-invading, there would be demands for military action on the part of England which Charles might find it very difficult to refuse. At the same time such military action (which no French subsidy could cover) would necessitate the recall of Parliament.
That was not a consummation to be wished by Charles
II
, nor for that matter by Louis
XIV
. But at least the French King’s known distaste for an English Parliament and English military action offered the English King a possible way out of his predicament. Charles
II
could hold Louis
XIV
’s advances in check by the threat of calling a Parliament. The English King
was back in the world of the diplomatic see-saw on which he had balanced so successfully in the 1670s; in both cases the existence of a secret French subsidy added to the complexity of the situation.
The blockade of Luxembourg by Louis
XIV
in late 1681 provided an instance of Charles
II
’s poise. Charles spoke firmly to Barrillon. He would be most reluctant to call a Parliament – ‘they are devils who want my ruin’ – but might yet be obliged to do so, ‘if an expedient is not found over the Luxembourg affair’. ‘Please tell the king my brother,’ he begged Barrillon, ‘to relieve me of my embarrassment.’
36
It is doubtful whether Charles would in fact have called a Parliament. Too many things militated against it. Yet by the spring of 1682 Louis
XIV
had lifted the blockade of Luxembourg and was requesting Charles
II
to arbitrate between the various warring nations. It is true that Spain (England’s ally, according to the most recent treaty negotiated by Sunderland) refused to accept Charles’ arbitration. He was obliged to draw back. Still, Charles had not lost his balance on the European see-saw. Neither one King – Louis
XIV
– nor five hundred – the English Parliament – had managed to upset it.
What would now be termed the life-style of King Louis
XIV
continued to impress Charles
II
, as it impressed all Europe. We have seen how Charles’ royal guards were an imitation of his cousin’s. The King had laid out his parks and gardens in the grand French manner displayed by Le Nôtre. Now, on 23 March 1683, the foundation stone for a new royal palace was laid in England.
Nothing on a similar scale had been planned for years: the work at Greenwich begun at the start of the reign had never been completed and life at Newmarket had been conducted on altogether a more modest scale. The palace at Winchester owed its origin directly to Charles
II
’s admiration for splendiferous Versailles and in design it resembled the work of Le Vaux there.
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Its geographical site in southern England also fitted in with the concept ‘of another way of ruling’.
The love affair with Newmarket, begun in the halcyon sixties, had faded. The trouble was that Newmarket lay in an area
already dotted with the great palaces of the Whig lords. There was no way that the King could cut a more imposing figure than his own nobility, since all the available land had already been commandeered. The fire in his Newmarket lodgings which had enabled him to elude the Rye House assassination gave him an excuse to look elsewhere; the connection of this conspiracy and the Newmarket route was in any case an uncomfortable one. The King’s eye fell on Winchester, which lay in the balmy south in Hampshire: an area where – on the whole – men and magnates were Royalists. More romantically, Winchester was on the way to that coast and those coastal towns, including Portsmouth, which nursed the Navy. Like many an enthusiast since, the King could go yachting off the Isle of Wight. The King expected to be able to see the fleet at Spithead from his projected palace; what fairer prospect?
The dwelling, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was to be surrounded by a park and connected to the town’s historic cathedral by a ‘stately street’. It would lie east and west. There were to be 160 rooms, surmounted by a lofty cupola which would be visible from the sea. The grand staircase was to be ornamented with marble columns, a gift to the King from the Duke of Tuscany. Then there were to be a central portico and two wings, as well as a raised terrace all the way round, such as dignified Windsor Castle. As for the park, here a thirty-foot cascade was proposed; the King hoped to repeat his success with ornamental water in St James’s Park. A river through the park was intended to be navigable by small vessels. The park itself, an eight-mile circuit, would open into the forest, suitable for stag-hunting. Back at the palace, stables, kennels and mews would house the equipment of the chase.
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