20A

Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy, 1603-1702

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SECTION FOUR The Establishment of Constitutional Monarchy, 1678-1702

Topic 20 Political Developments and Conflicts: Exclusion and Absolutism

Key Question A: What was the Exclusion Crisis and why did the campaign for Exclusion fail?

The Popish Plot, 1678

In 1669, James, Duke of York, the brother of Charles II and the heir to the throne, took his first official Catholic communion. Rumours of his conversion began to spread in the early 1670s and were officially confirmed in 1673 when James refused to swear loyalty to the Church of England under the Test Act, choosing instead to resign from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty.

At this point, with Charles II having produced no legitimate children, James’s two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne, stood next in line to the throne after their father. However, in 1673, James married for a second time. His new wife was the 15-year-old Italian Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. As any son that might be procured from this marriage would usurp Mary and Anne in the succession, the very real possibility of a long-term Catholic dynasty was created. This threat led to the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-81.

Concerns about the offspring of James and Mary of Modena inheriting the throne became a fully-fledged political emergency with the revelation of the Popish Plot in the summer of 1678. The ‘plot’ was the brainchild of Titus Oates, an Anglican chaplain and preacher, who alleged that a group of Jesuits based in London were planning to assassinate the King during one of his daily walks through St James’ Park. According to Oates, the aim was to install James as the new Catholic monarch, which would then trigger a public massacre of thousands of Protestants across England.

Oates, however, was hardly a trustworthy source. Described as ‘a notorious renegade’, he had left Cambridge University without a degree, but managed to get himself ordained by the Bishop of London by falsifying his graduation certificate. He had also been dismissed from several clerical positions for a variety of misdemeanours, including drunkenness, blasphemy, and perjury. The fact that a man such as Oates could convince so many people of a completely fictitious conspiracy can only be explained by the century of suspicion about the supposedly subversive activities of Catholics in England, which had now been exacerbated by James’s potential inheritance of the throne. Circumstantial events in England at this time made people more willing to believe Oates’s wild claims. In 1678, London was in the grip of an economic depression, with unemployment rates soaring. Catholics became a convenient scapegoat who could be blamed for just about anything. Oates found a willing accomplice in Israel Tonge, a fanatically anti-Catholic clergyman. To substantiate the Popish Plot, Tonge anonymously wrote a manuscript that named nearly 100 Jesuits as being complicit in the conspiracy and accused the Catholic authorities of approving the assassination. The manuscript was planted in the house of Charles II’s personal physician, so it was guaranteed to come to the King’s attention. Charles treated the claims with scepticism, but the fervently Anglican majority in Parliament seized upon them and insisted that an investigation be launched.

Under oath, Oates gave his account of the plot to presiding magistrate, Sir Edmund Godfrey. When Godfrey was subsequently found murdered shortly after the hearing, tensions reached fever pitch. Many paranoid Protestants jumped to the conclusion that this could only be the work of the Catholic plotters, who were taking their revenge on the man who was about to uncover their murderous intent. Giving further credibility to Oakes’s allegations was the fact that one of the first conspirators he named, Edward Coleman (Mary of Modena’s personal secretary), was found to have been in regular dialogue with a Jesuit confessor at the court of Louis XIV. For Oates’s supporters, this was already more than enough proof of the authenticity of the Popish Plot.

Many Protestants in the city began openly carrying weapons to defend themselves against the impending Catholic attack. The House of Commons was searched in the expectation of a second Gunpowder Plot. Anyone suspected of being a Catholic was driven out of London and forbidden to be within ten miles of the city. A young Catholic banker called William Staley was overheard by a government informer making a drunken threat against the King – within ten days he had been executed for intention to murder.

With his reputation and status enhanced – he was given a state apartment in Whitehall and an annual allowance of £1,200 – Oates stepped up his campaign. He implicated five leading Catholic nobles in the plot, accusing them of treason. Charles continued to try and laugh off the allegations, but Parliament had these ‘five popish lords’ arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. At the height of this anti-Catholic hysteria, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, publicly demanded that James be disqualified from the line of succession, thus beginning the Exclusion Crisis. On 05 November 1678, people burned effigies of the Pope instead of Guy Fawkes. At the end of the year, the Cavalier Parliament passed The Second Test Act, excluding Catholics from membership of both Houses.

Oates now upped the ante even further by claiming that Queen Catherine and the King's physician were plotting together to have him poisoned. Unwilling to tolerate any accusations against members of the Royal Household, Charles now personally intervened and interrogated Oates himself. He found a number of major discrepancies in his account, and ordered his arrest, but Parliament forced his release several days later.

His speedy exoneration allowed Oates to present yet more outlandish allegations. He claimed, for example, that the would-be assassins possessed ‘silver bullets’ that would ensure the King died slowly with maximum suffering. The paranoid public invented their own stories, which included tales that the sound of digging had been heard near the House of Commons, and that French warships had been spotted off the South Coast. Catholics were outed in their hundreds by self-appointed informers. Some of these informers were notorious criminals, but others were men of good social standing who denounced the innocent out of sheer greed or motives of revenge. In any event, the weight of evidence being presented to the government seemed to make the Popish Plot more credible.

As time went on, however, popular opinion slowly but surely began to turn against Oates. The steady protestations of innocence by all of those who were executed eventually gained traction in the public consciousness. The convicted priests were almost all venerable and popular members their communities, and there was widespread public horror at their deaths. After the final execution in July 1681, the judges gradually began to take a more impartial line, ruling that it was not treason for a Catholic to advocate the conversion of England to the old faith, nor should donating financial aid to religious houses lead to the death penalty. The Chief Justice, William Scroggs, began to instruct juries to acquit a number of priests before the evidence against them could be heard. Charles, deeply scarred by the number of innocent men he had been forced to condemn to death, fully approved of this strategy.

In August 1681, Oates was ordered to leave his apartments in Whitehall. He made one final attempt to regain the initiative by claiming James had been complicit in the plans for the assassination. This was one allegation too far: he was arrested for sedition, fined the sum of £100,000 and thrown into prison. A few years later, when James II became King, he had Oates sentenced to be pilloried on the streets of London once a year.

Once the agitation had finally died down, senior legal figures finally started to scrutinise the full extent of Oates’s fabrications. At the investigation’s conclusion, the judge decreed that 35 innocent men had been wrongly executed on charges of treason. The Popish Plot had finally been discredited, but not before its revelation had impacted English politics in a highly significant way.

The Whig-Tory split: In 1679, Charles II had finally been forced to dissolve the Cavalier Parliament after 18 years. When the newly-elected House of Commons met, there was a sharper and more pronounced division between Whig MPs (who supported Exclusion) and Tories (who supported the Stuart Kings).
The fall of Danby: Those who had been resentful of Danby’s method of governing, such as Shaftesbury, could now openly voice their fears that the King was attempting to make himself an absolute monarch. As a result, evidence was unearthed revealing that the Crown had been receiving French subsidies. This led to Danby’s imprisonment in the Tower, and the beginning of impeachment proceedings against him.
Catholic persecution: The Second Test Act, which excluded Catholics from Parliament, was issued in 1678. An exemption for James passed by just two votes. Penal laws against Catholics were tightened, much to the dismay of the King, who bitterly resented the damage done to his reputation for religious tolerance.

The Exclusion Crisis: its aims, methods and failure

The First Exclusion Parliament, Mar-Jul 1679: Charles had dissolved the Cavalier Parliament in January 1679. This was an attempt to diffuse the growing crisis and prevent further accusations being made against Danby. However, the need for money compelled him to call for new elections almost immediately, and the membership of the new Parliament was weighted at least two-to-one in favour of the ‘Country’ (mainly Whigs, who were in favour of Exclusion) and against the ‘Court’ (mainly Tories, who supported the Stuart line of succession). As a result, the King was forced into making a number of important concessions to hostile MPs, who were determined to defend the Protestant cause against the perceived threat of Catholicism and absolutism:

James was sent on a diplomatic mission to Brussels to remove him from the potentially explosive situation in England;
Danby was persuaded to resign from his position as Lord Treasurer and surrender himself to arrest (he spent the next five years in prison);
the Privy Council was remodelled to include opponents of the Crown, such as Shaftesbury, who was appointed its Lord President;
the King’s standing army was disbanded (in return for parliamentary supply of £200,000);
The Habeas Corpus Amendment Act reinforced the common law right whereby, unless for treason or felony, the cause of imprisonment had to be stated and trial proceedings begun within three days;
Charles promised that further limitations would be placed on any Catholic successor, including the removal of their power to appoint bishops, as well as civil, legal and military officers.

Despite these measures, the King’s more extreme opponents remained dissatisfied, especially when knowledge of Edward Coleman’s correspondence, implying that James had been negotiating with both France and the Pope, became public The Commons, led by Shaftesbury, now passed the following resolution: James’s Catholicism has given the greatest countenance and encouragement to the present conspiracies and designs of the papists against the King and the Protestant religion. The House of Lords diplomatically inserted the word ‘unwittingly’ into this statement to at least imply James was innocent of any wilful wrongdoing.

A few days later, the leading Whigs introduced an Exclusion Bill that would replace James with the King’s illegitimate son, James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth. A popular Protestant figure who had been a successful military commander during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, Monmouth’s mother was Lucy Walter, a noblewoman who many claimed Charles had secretly married during his exile from England in the 1650s.

The sense of crisis in England was increased by developments in Scotland. In May 1679, a Covenanter mob murdered the Bishop of St Andrews, while a full-scale Presbyterian uprising erupted in the south-west of the country, with the rebels claiming to be ‘resisting the threat of popery’.

Shaftesbury’s Exclusion Bill passed on its second reading in the Commons by 207-128 votes. Charles swiftly prorogued, then dissolved, Parliament in July 1679 so the Bill could not be put before the House of Lords. Meanwhile, the King skilfully used the end of the Franco-Dutch War to negotiate funds from both nations (in return for England’s neutrality) so he could avoid having to summon another parliament for as long as possible. Ironically, a serious illness suffered by the King in August highlighted with grimly perfect timing how close the realm might be to a Catholic succession.

The Second Exclusion Parliament, 1680-81: Charles’s stance hardened in the wake of his illness. He temporarily exiled Monmouth to the Netherlands, dismissed Shaftesbury from the Privy Council and replaced him with younger advisers who were more loyal to the Crown, such as Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland. Whig-aligned administrators in the counties were purged, leaving local government in the hands of more loyal Tories. He also used his royal powers of prorogation seven times, so that the Second Exclusion Parliament did not actually meet until a full twelve months after its original summons.

The tactics to which Shaftesbury now resorted also proved damaging to the Exclusionist cause. A massive petitioning movement was launched, culminating in a ‘monster petition’ that contained over 16,000 signatures and was over 100 yards in length. If anything, this stiffened the King’s resolve further and produced a counter-movement of loyalism among members of the Political Nation. To these MPs, Exclusion had begun to look like an assault on the fundamental bedrock of legitimate government.

For his part, James strengthened his position during this period by suppressing the religious disturbances in Scotland. His effective campaign against the radical Presbyterians alleviated doubts about his leadership credentials, and led to a declaration by the Scottish Assembly that he would become King of Scotland when his brother died. This gave Charles an important advantage, as it meant that all political ties between the two kingdoms would end if the Exclusionists succeeded in disqualifying James from the succession in England.

Becoming increasingly desperate, Shaftesbury made another series of errors, first by claiming there was a Catholic plot brewing in Ireland, then by trying to bring charges of recusancy against James, and of prostitution against one of the King’s mistresses. This made Charles even more determined that Shaftesbury and the Whigs must not win. The King even published a personal declaration against them in The London Gazette (a government-controlled newspaper). This convinced Tory loyalists that Exclusion had become dangerously anti-monarchical and threatened the stability of the nation.

In this context, the Second Exclusion Parliament was finally allowed to sit in October 1680. Another Exclusion Bill passed through the Commons but was rejected by the Lords. Here, the King’s actions proved crucial: Charles used his right to be personally present during the hearing of the Bill, thus making visible his clear support for his brother’s succession. Also significant were the powerful speeches made by George Savile, the Marquis of Halifax, who argued that a compromise could be reached that would allow James to inherit the throne as a Catholic monarch with powers that had been limited through parliamentary legislation. This attitude marked Halifax out as one of the early MPs described as a ‘trimmer’ – moderate politicians who positioned themselves between the two extremes of Whig and Tory. The fact that an increasing number of the Political Nation were beginning to see Exclusion as too radical was an important development.

In response to the rejection of the Exclusion Bill by the Lords, the Commons offered Charles £600,000 to remove James from the succession and announced it would grant no further money to the Crown until he accepted. Furious at such impertinent bargaining, Charles promptly dissolved Parliament in January 1681.

The Oxford (Third Exclusion) Parliament, March 1681: Charles moved the next parliament to the loyalist stronghold of Oxford. In this way, he took advantage of moderate sentiment against the radicalism of Exclusionists and avoided the highly-charged atmosphere of London, where support for the Whig cause was at its strongest. Additionally, on the eve of the first session, Charles signed a treaty with France, whereby he accepted around £115,000 per year over the next three years (with an immediate payment of £40,000) in return for a promise not to summon Parliament again over the same period.

From this position of strength, Charles made MPs an offer at the opening of Parliament: James would remain the heir, but would be King in name only, with real power being exercised by a regency of James’s Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, Prince of the Dutch Royal House of Orange. Whether this was a genuine offer or a clever political tactic, it succeeded in dividing his Exclusionist opponents. Shaftesbury and his allies continued to push for an outright rejection of James in favour of Monmouth. In response, Charles claimed, with some justification, that he had “law and reason and all right-thinking men on my side”. He ended his speech with a declaration that he would never alter the succession. Parliament was swiftly dissolved, never to be summoned again while Charles lived.

The dissolution of the final Exclusion Parliament was followed by a wave of pro-royalist propaganda that emphasised the benefits of the King’s moderate policy. In April 1681, a pamphlet entitled The Declaration Touching the Reasons that Moved Him to Dissolve the Last Two Parliaments was ordered to be read from every pulpit across the country. The clear and consistent stance of the King resonated with the prevailing mood of the Political Nation, especially outside London. The campaign for Exclusion had been defeated.

The last years of Charles II, 1681-85

Having spent the first part of his reign working against the Anglican interest, particularly in his attempts to undermine the intolerant religious settlement imposed by the Cavalier Parliament, Charles now threw his full support behind it. After all, the Tories (as they were now being called) had proved to be his most ardent supporters throughout the Exclusion Crisis. For this reason, the period 1681-85 is sometimes referred to as the ‘Tory Reaction’. This term indicates the increasing polarisation of the political landscape. The labels ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ now had genuine purchase, both inside and outside Parliament. The typical means of identification came to be whether a member of the Political Nation had supported the Exclusion campaign (making them a Whig) or had opposed it (making them a Tory).

Several measures were taken to marginalise those who had supported Exclusion and ensure that loyalists to the Crown exercised the greatest share of influence throughout the country:

a number of Whigs were removed from office using the King’s prerogative powers, and some were executed (Shaftesbury fled abroad);
despite the 1664 Triennial Act necessitating that another Parliament should have been called in 1684, Charles declined to do so – by avoiding involvement with foreign quarrels, he had no urgent need of money, and with his French subsidy and an improved peacetime customs revenue, the Crown was reasonably financially secure;
the Clarendon Code was enforced with renewed enthusiasm against dissenters, some of whom were Whigs (who tended to favour greater religious toleration);
any Whig view advanced in print could be subject to libel proceedings;
a list compiled by Shaftesbury of county judges sympathetic to the Exclusionist cause was uncovered, and all the officials that appeared on it were expelled from the legal profession;
fraud and violence were used to ensure Tory officials were selected for key positions in local government, especially in London;
Charles launched a highly effective Quo Warranto campaign: issuing writs for royal charters that had been granted to 51 boroughs and the City of London to be scrutinised by a legal team. These charters were then revised to allow the Crown to appoint its own nominees to positions of authority (e.g., mayor, alderman, etc.) and oust anyone suspected of having been in favour of Exclusion.

The Tory dominance was so complete that several leading Whigs felt compelled to launch an assassination attempt against the King. The so-called Rye House Plot of 1683 aimed to have Charles killed at a race meeting at Newmarket. It was foiled when the royal party decided to leave unexpectedly early. The leaders, Arthur Capell, the Earl of Essex, and Algernon Sidney, a long-time royal diplomat and well-known political philosopher, were arrested and imprisoned. The former was executed while the latter committed suicide in his cell. Their failure increased support for the monarchy, and soon dissenters (especially Quakers) were being persecuted with more vigour than ever before. As James became more political influential, penal laws against Catholics were relaxed, and when Charles himself suffered a life-threatening stroke in February 1685, James secretly smuggled a Catholic priest to his chamber to receive the King’s deathbed conversion to the old faith.

Charles II has been criticised by some for his unprincipled opportunism, and for the fact that his conduct from 1678-85 had strong echoes of absolutism. Indeed, because no official settlement between the Crown and Parliament had been reached, it could be argued that the Exclusion Crisis continued well beyond 1681, particularly since James’s accession in 1685 was challenged by a rebellion in the name of the Duke of Monmouth. The King’s reliance on Louis XIV for money could also be said to have undermined the Crown’s position in the final years of the reign.

Nevertheless, a reasonable case can be made to argue that overall, Charles was a relatively successful pragmatist. Having faced down a parliamentary attempt to overturn the established laws of succession, he had constructed a powerful support base of Tory Anglicans, whose devotion to the monarchy and Church of England was unquestionable, and who had now been elevated to and established in important positions of power throughout the country.