In 1677, Danby finally seemed to have cracked Charles’ problem with parliament – until a diplomatic game of will-he-won’t-he in the Anglo Dutch war rose to the level of farce, and derailed everything. In the middle of it all – a 15 year old girl was pushed weeping into a highly significant marriage for which she had no wish

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Transcript

Last time we heard about the arrival of Charles’ new favourite, and Prime Ministry, Thomas Osborne the Earl of Danby in 1675. The haughty, unlikeable and proud Danby might not have had the visionary, and charismatic, hail fellow-well-met characteristics of your average successful political leader; but he had some killer talents. He knew no one called Ruth, he was good with money, and was single minded at pursuing a plan; and he had a good plan to pursue, which chimed with a majority of English people – he would base the regime on supporting the Anglican church against all its enemies, whether they be Catholic or Presbyterian, or anabaptist, or indeed even if old Uncle Tom Cobbly and all his chumps joined in. ‘The Church is in Danger!’ he would cry and mount his steed of righteousness at the sound of any trouble, or the mere mention of a French Absolutist; or better, splash the cash on likely lads who would sign up to his Court and Spark Party. Plus And probably most importantly he had the confidence of his king – for now.

Still as we had heard, he had met with variable success in 1675 and parliament had proved stubbornly unhelpful despite all the outlay of cash and emoluments; so much so that his Louis loving king prorogued parliament for an unfashionably long 15 months, and accepted a bribe from Louis for so doing. Hold on you your hats for the story of the next couple of years. They are the story of how Danby tried to persuade his king that a happy future lies with Anglicanism and a Protestant alliance against France; against Charles’ irritation with parliament, and his love of France. All of this is set against the fiercely complicated diplomacy of the Franco Dutch war; and hopefully, we will manage to get a few battles in along the way. Mainly for the benefit of a member of our parish, Bloodthirsty Baxter, who likes a bit of violence and exploding heads. I think I am right in saying that Baxter was one of the family names of the Scottish reivers and it’s unsurprising to find a lover of raiding and mayhem among the descendants. It’s in the genes.

One of the problems Danby faced, was that just as he was organising a party of the Court and its supporters, so an opposition was emerging. Instead of a court party, a Country affinity was developing. The Country faction will be a continuing feature of English and British politics, right up to the Great Reform Act of 1832, and the backwoodsmen who then opposed any sort of reform. But it’s important to disassociate the Country party from a particular political programme or party; it’s more by way of a vibe. The provenance of the name Country is important; we are not talking Country in the sense of a Nation, England, Scotland, Wales or Hungary, for example, the word is being used in the sense of my home patch, my country – be that Banburyshire, or Hallamshire; my region, where I come from. Where my heart is, and also my hat.

It might also get some energy from ‘not the City’ – the city as always being the forward looking, progressive, modern, get rich quick London type. Whether the Country faction supported Whig or Tory, Liberal or Tory, it was deeply, deeply suspicious of exactly the sort of stuff Danby was doing; corruption, bribery, placemen snouts-in-trough men, who feathered their own nests while sacrificing England’s liberty to the king, courtiers, to the rich & powerful, who pursued war and glory in search of profit. While they, the virtuous, salt of the earth dirt under the fingernail brigade defended the traditional soul and liberty of merrie England, peace loving hobbit types – though without the hairy feet or golden rings of power.

So this was the source of some of the problems Danby faced getting his programme through parliament; and in the 1670s these folks were gathering behind a man that become the great opponent of Charles and his ministers, a man who had once been part of his very ministry – I speak of Anthony Ashley-Copper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who must now come forward to the front of the stage.

And so we might talk of him a wee bit – and of his protégé. He’s in his mid 50s now is Shaftesbury, and we’ve come across him quite a bit; he’s been on Cromwell’s council, he’s worked for Charles on his PC, and now he’ll be his fiercest critic; all of this means that contemporaries could be pretty cynical about his motives, as ambitious and unprincipled; Dryden was not a fan

Restless, unfixt in Principle and Place,

In Power unpleas’d, impatient of Disgrace

The ‘Dorsetshire Eel’  people would call him, so slippery no one could catch him. And possibly because they thought the world would be better off if he became a jellied eel? Not sure about that, but you know the sentiment. Not that I have ever had a jellied eel, and you know that guy who said that to live well, you should try everything once? Well I’m going to have to assume he wasn’t thinking jellied eel when he said it.

Anyway, I blether. But history is very confused about the Dorsetshire Un-jellied Eel; because while he would betray every king he served, he does appear to have a hard principled core. So while other famous, rebellious figures like Algernon Sidney sullied their names by taking bribes form Louis XIV, Shaftesbury turned them down. And other contemporaries were much more positive, one of whom was John Locke, and to be fair to have someone of the stature of Locke on your side had got to help

‘a strenuous Defender [and] vigilant Preserver [of] Liberty in both Civil, and Ecclesiastical affairs’

Is how he summed up his patron. It may be that to square the circle of contradictions, we have to accept that Shaftesbury had at his core a passion for freedom of protestant worship, and constitutional liberty, that would take precedence over his undoubted ambition. Because he would risk his career in those causes.

Now, as I mentioned just then, Shaftesbury was indeed Locke’s patron. Locke was born in 1632 in a Somerset village, son of a good Calvinist who he’d seen go off to the wars to fight for Parliament; though he had himself then been sent to school at the thoroughly royalist Westminster. He had then been at Oxford University, gaining a reputation in medicine and natural philosophy; Anthony Wood described him as

A man of turbulent spirit, clamorous and never contented’

Though having said that, Locke wrote that maybe the civil wars could have been avoided

‘had men been more sparing of their ink’

Since in his view

Furies, war, cruelty, rapine and confusion had all been conjured up in private studies[1]

Which doesn’t seem to fit the image of such an influential thinker, but there you go. But certainly his famed support for religious toleration had already been stimulated by a visit in 1665 to the lands of the Elector of Brandenburg. During the visit, he wrote to Robert Boyle of the toleration he’d seen there;

They quietly permit one another to choose their way to heaven

In 1666 he happened to meet Shaftesbury, and was able to help him. Shaftesbury was a sickly sort of creature despite his vast political and campaigning energy, and probably had an abscess on his liver. It required what was a very dicey medical procedure at the time, the insertion of a tube to drain excess fluids – anyone feeling queasy? Quite how much Locke was directly involved, tube insertion wise, is anybody’s guess, but Shaftesbury was convinced Locke had saved his life. Locke then moved into Shaftesbury’s house on the Strand, Exeter house, and would stay for 8 years.

Locke would meet Thomas Syndenham while there – he of ‘you are only as old as your arteries fame’ – he’d be elected a member of the Royal Society, and may have got involved with Shaftesbury in producing the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, which has a chequered reputation. On the one hand, an admirable attitude towards complete religious toleration; on the other hand rather feudal in governance, and supportive of enslavement.

Locke and Shaftesbury seemed to hit it off, sharing the same views of toleration and the prospects of royal absolutism. So it’s thought that Locke may have helped Shaftesbury compose an incendiary pamphlet, a call to arms, a declaration of war around which the Country faction could begin to coalesce; it was a 15,000 word piece, so about 3 episodes worth of the History of England, a 15,000 word diatribe against the Court faction.

It was called A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country, a deceptively, warm, comfy and even slipper based title for a piece of vitriol, inspired by Danby’s proposed Test Acts to enforce the most rigid possible Anglicanism and Monarchical obedience on anyone in public office. For Shaftesbury this was characterised by

‘the high episcopal man, and of the old Cavaliers

Danby and his ilk, that is.

The nub of his argument was this:

They design to have the government of the Church sworn to as unalterable, and so tacitly owned to be of divine right…then in requital to the Crown, they declare the government absolute and arbitrary, and allow monarchy as well as Episcopy to be divine law, and not to be bounded or limited by human laws

This then is the programme which Shaftesbury will lead, and behind which will assemble a slightly odd coalition. Odd because in its defence of Protestantism it would very much embrace the low church, the puritan elements of Anglicanism, the broad church, latitudinarians as well as the Dissenters; and the fractious, politically seditious dissenters would not always be allies of the Country type. But for now they would work together, in the face of what they saw as Charles’ ambitions to make himself in the image of his hero, the absolutism Catholic monarch Louis XIV.

Now, as far as Danby was concerned, although he’d had a tough old time of it with parliament in 1675, he might actually have preferred Charles not to have grumpily prorogued parliament so long, in pursuit of a French payoff. He had a problem with his Very own people, the High Anglicans. Parliament had by now conceived a deep mistrust of Charles, and that was why they had refused to play ball with him for the last two years. They loved the Church of England, and they were pretty convinced that it’s governor, the King of England, did not love it as much as they did, and would eat away at the foundations of the institution they thought England’s greatest defence, the Church. He randomly granted indulgences to those seditious and aggressive Dissenters, who believed in religious toleration would you believe, and Charles had to be dragged back to sanity by good ‘ole parliament. Good golly, whatever next? Well, I’ll tell you whatever next – because even worse, he favoured Catholics, quite possibly was one; his brother was a Catholic, and his bro was the most Catholic monarch of France. Danby’s Anglican mates in parliament were convinced they were surrounded by a rising tide of Dissenters and Catholics who would bring their beloved Church down, into the mud, and tread their faces into the dirt.

So, Danby rather cleverly chose this moment to commission a bit of research, because his instinct was that Anglicans were getting their knickers in a twist and getting way too worked about these worries and just needed to calm down, and the best thing to calm people down is always a bit of good solid data, reality not hearsay, and rumour, and hysterical panicking. And so the Bishop of London, one Henry Compton was commissioned to carry out a census, and in so doing Compton would live forever in the hearts of English historians, hopefully to the end of time. Every parish was asked to tell the good Bish how many inhabitants there were, how many recusants – Catholics that is – and how many dissenters.

The answer was absolutely extraordinary as far as the panickers were concerned. Everyone was basically an Anglican. Catholics were less than 1%, Non conformists less than 5%, so even accounting for fibbers and cheaters and church papists the idea of a vast conspiracy of papists or seditious dissenters was moonshine, for the birds. Whoof that’s a relief – open that bottle of claret, Darling, lets’ have some roast pudding ad a ole good sing song.

Now, obviously, you won’t be surprised to learn that this sense of reality won’t last; I had 9 months off work once with a job to then go to at the end of it, so nothing to panic about at all, so guess what? I found something else to panic about instead of work and money. It’s not just nature that abhors a vacuum, stress and panic hate them too. But for a while there was a distinct lightening of the national political mood.

And it had a handy kicker. Danby was able to shove the data under Charles’ nose, and point out that his daft idea of indulging Dissenters was a complete waste of time; the vessel of Dissent was empty, and it was just that like most empty vessels, they made more noise. Sadly, Charles never again reverted to the idea of a broad settlement that comprehended everyone in his three kingdoms, which to his credit had been his instinct from 1660. As far as domestic policy for England is concerned, Danby’s Anglican tyranny will be his way forward; and in Scotland, its equivalent in a church based on an episcopal structure, which rejected the Covenanters and a national, presbyterian kirk.

1676 was a remarkably quiet year outside of Charles’ bedroom; one historian remarked that

Everyone was busy except the king

But Hutton thinks that’s a bit unfair – and then goes on to rather reinforce the point by describing Charles’ year in terms of a thoroughly enjoyable sounding yachting trip down the coast to Cornwall, the ennoblement of his illegitimate child by Barbara Castlemaine, and the most dramatic event of the year, the news that he had given Louise de Kerouallle another present, a handsome gift, the benefits of venereal disease. She was of course livid, and blamed the fact that he didn’t seem to restrain his random sex to nice clean courtiers, but with what she described as ‘trulls’. He did try to patch it up with a gift jewellery of £10,000 – so two gifts, VD and Gems. None of this helped the majesty of majesty project – although he did touch for the king’s Evil on his yachting trip – and the good people of London expressed their disgust in mockery at his behaviour. A sign appeared on his Dad’s grand new statue, a placard saying

Haste, post-haste, for a midwife.

An anecdote did the rounds that when Charles had accused Shaftesbury of being the ‘greatest Whoremaster in the kingdom’ – Shaftesbury cooly responded that he supposed he might be – amongst the subjects. Suggesting, of course, that his king would blow any subjects out of the water on that front.

 

Now it might have been better for Charles if William of Orange had continued his military resurgence after pushing the French out of the Netherlands, and forced Louis into a peace, because it would have settled his subjects’ fears about external threats from France to their liberty and religion. But that didn’t happen; the war had settled down into a war of attrition, Louis’ famous military Engineer le Marquis de Vauban had built what they called an Iron Belt of fortresses. As a result of this a peace conference was started at Nijmegen, in which England was involved as a mediator; though in May to Danby’s despair, Charles signed a secret treaty with Louis, where both of them promised not to make a separate peace. A feature of Charles’ adherence to France was not just the culture that he loved, or the shiny metal it earned him; but his brother James. Together, James and Louis fought a constant battle to strangle Danby’s anti Catholic, anti French strategy.

But despite this win for them, Charles was getting hacked off with Louis, whom he accused of not paying enough for his support, or understanding the difficulties he faced with his parliament. In this he seriously misread the level of Louis’ duplicity; because his soul mate and bro Louis was, as mentioned, secretly bankrolling Charles;’ enemies to stir up trouble for him in parliament – the likes of Algernon Sidney, the later whig hero of the Good Old Cause. It suited Louis for Charles to be distracted, dazed and confused.

Peace and quiet was shattered in 1677 from a few source, because the colonials were revolting; this is the time of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, which is an interesting old thing, involving native Americans, rebel colonials and the Governor, but I am not going into detail of things like that; given that Britain, um, gets around internationally shall we say I don’t think I can afford to cover the politics of every country in detail without my brain dribbling out of my ear, and nobody wants that. But the point is that restoring order cost £200,000 which needed paying. And then there was a long expected problem, in that additional excises voted for the king by parliament in 1671 to pay for war & stuff, were due to expire, and how would Charles pay for his mistress’ expenses without that? All of this pointed towards the need for spodulikes, and the holder of the purse strings was still the representative of the people. And so that meant the long-prorogued parliament must be recalled.

The long-prorogued parliament met in February 1677, with Charles’ by now customary appeal for money and ships, in return for bills to secure liberty and religion.  And almost immediately a couple of things happened which helped Danby to enjoy his best year under Charles. The first was a political blunder from Shaftesbury and Buckingham. As I mentioned, the pair of them had been behind much of the trouble with the Country party’s resistance to Danby’s politics, and the success of sinking his Extended Test acts sort of went to their heads a little bit. A bit of background; sometime in 1675 they had been part of the formation of a loose association of Radicals, by forming a club, which took its name and inspiration from the radicals of the Revolution, the Levellers – it called itself the Green Ribbon Club, and in the finest tradition of the revolution, met in a pub of course, the King’s Head Chancery lane. After all, if you are going to be revolting, you might as well get a few pints in while you are doing it.  Over the next few years, the Green Ribbon club would plan an increasingly vitriolic campaign of leaflets, campaign material like playing cards even, and massive out of doors events. Sadly a key tactic was to whip up anti Catholic bigotry – or at least anti papal bigotry. An example of this had already started, with Pope  burning processions in 1674 and 5 through the city of London. I mean it wasn’t the actual pope, he was busy, but an effigy, obs. They were often on 17^th November which you will of course have in your diaries as the date of the accession of Good Queen Bess. Or sometimes they were held on Bonfire Night.

What Shaftesbury wanted in 1677 was as much furore as possible. And what more furore could there be than a general election? And although the Cavalier parliament was getting more and more antsy, it’s basic instincts were still defined by its name  – the Cavalier parliament, and was packed with Danby’s pensioners. So in parliament after the king had made his customary pleas, Shaftesbury got on his hind legs and demanded that parliament should be dissolved. Based on some statute of Edward III’s, he argued that because of the long prorogation, parliament had been effectively dissolved anyway. Buckingham, and three other lords backed him up. This was a direct attack on the royal prerogative, they were  ordered to beg for pardon, they refused and were carted off to the Tower until they did.

Which  is all very newsworthy and so on; but it left the Country party without its most effective champion in parliament. Danby was delighted the Finance Bill was therefore passed. It was a doozy. The additional excise was granted, and a tax of £600,000 awarded too. Charles was like a pig in muck, and when it appeared in the House of Lords he skipped down there and happily measured the length of the bill with the Treasurer’s staff. Danby had done it, by George he’d done it – he had solved the parliament problem. Charles gave him due reward by making him a Knight of the Garter.

It was at this point that Louis chose to rain on his parade. In March Vauban exercised his military genius in bossing the counter trenches outside Valenciennes, the mighty fortress in the Spanish Netherlands which had defied the French for over a year. On 17^th March, he planned a surprise attack – surprise in that it would happen during the day, whereas the practice had always been nighttime; and to help, Louis gave him the use of his elite Musketeers of the Guard. On 17^th March, out of the trenches they came and overwhelmed the defences. Next would of course come the sack, chaos death and destruction; the French commander was Luxembourg, and the Dutch knew him of old. The multiple sacks and atrocities he had committed on towns during the disasters of 1672, with systematic burning of towns, murder, rape and torture of civilians had become part of the inspirations of Dutch resistance. They had been made more real by the paintings of Romeyn de Hooghe, which graphically presented the French as uniquely brutal. So instead, the Spanish commander quickly surrendered, the citizens paid Luxembourg loads of money to leave them alone, and they were spared.

Well there was panic. William was proving himself one of the great generals, and knew he had to act fast before the same happened to the other great fortresses of St Omer and Cambrai, and so although he was in a weak position he rolled the dice, and with a combined Dutch and Spanish force he attacked; and at the battle of Cassels – suffered a disastrous defeat, 8,000 men dead and wounded, and was hastily forced to retreat. I must apologise here to Bloodthirsty Baxter and indeed Bloodthirsty Tony of this parish; I did look for some stuff on exploding heads or other associated horrors, but could not find any detailed descriptions. I feel I have failed you. But Louis on the other hand was overjoyed when Cambrai and St Omer then duly fell, and complete French victory once more seemed on the cards.

Well, all the calm caused by the Compton Census and the inaction of 1676 evaporated. Panic and anti French feeling were once more the order of the day. Parliament immediately voted on and sent a petition to the king to make the alliances with the Dutch required to secure the Spanish Netherlands from grubby French mitts by war or negotiation. Now, back then monarchs did not unfailingly welcome advice on foreign affairs from their subjects. So Charles was affronted. More than that, he was insulted – the roles here were clear; the royal prerogative was to order foreign relationships as the relevant royal saw fit. The prerogative of the people was to pay for it. Everyone knows that. When the Spanish Ambassador brought the Commons resolution to his notice, he took out the royal hanky, and royally threw it into the air and exclaimed that he cared that much for parliament.

So the Ambassador had told the king, the king had told the parliament, and the king told the Spanish Ambassador to keep his mouth shut in the future and the Spanish ambassador knew he’d done a good day’s work. It did not help Charles’ mood that Danby had also been bending his ear over the need for a Dutch alliance to stop Europe’s most powerful nation becoming Europe’s even more powerful nation, and to win the respect and love of the Political nation.

I have to warn you that Charles’ strategy from here on in is confusing in the extreme, flip flopping first one way and then the next, and both ways oftentimes. And this, I am sorry to say, is the type of carnage to which the title refers, rather than to blood and guts and gore. His aim essentially was to wring the best deal he could from anyone and everyone, and make darned sure in the process he never again had to make all the concessions he’d had to after the disaster of Medway. So he demanded money from, parliament so he could make the appropriate alliances. Parliament replied, hmm, no, why don’t you make the alliances and we’ll then give you the appropriate funding because otherwise you’ll probably just blow it on something stupid. Charles repeated his demand more loudly making the not unreasonable point that without cash and force to back him up, the French would see no point in making peace, parliament put their hands over their ears and said not listening, so Charles yelled ;’this is an intolerable assault on my prerogative and prorogued parliament yet again’.

Basically king and parliament are mired in mutual distrust. Charles complained, a bit like his Dad, of ambitious power seekers and republicans in parliament. Andrew Marvell expressed the fears of many when he wrote that since the Restoration there had been a conscious design

To change the lawful government of England into an Absolute tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant religion into downright Popery

Fortunately for Danby, Charles then became even more unhappy with Louis. His first reaction on proroguing parliament was to squeeze Louis for cash, as the price of his refusal to deal with his enemies and prorogue parliament. And so he ordered Danby, kicking and screaming, to make the deal with France. Danby of course wanted nothing to dop with France, but ours not to question why and all that, so he nonetheless bit his lip, closed a deal for £150,000, which Charles decided to try to improve on, resulting in an exasperated Louis too. Which hacked Charles off even more.

At which point Danby brought forward his own bit of scheming with a foreign Prince – namely William of Orange, Stadholder of the Dutch Republic. The plan they cooked up was a marriage alliance between William and James’ elder daughter, Mary. And given Louis and Charles were having a tiff, the timing was good.

Mary was 15 in 1677, and like most women of her rank, her education was limited to music, modern languages, needlework, dancing & music; no Latin or Greek for example. Bathusa Makin’s book on female education was dedicated to her, and that seems reflected in her concern about the limits of her own – so Mary read widely in Dutch, French and English, an auto didact. But the most important aspect of her education as far as her country, was concerned, was her religious education. Afterall, her Mum had converted, her dad had converted, she was at the time of writing second in line to the throne – lord forbid it if she converted to Catholicism as well. And so she was carefully educated in the rites of the CofE; which worked, actually, she loved it, and remained a passionate supporter throughout her life.

She was generally passionate in nature was Mary; she had long correspondences with a her girlfriend, Frances Apsley; they role played, Mary was the wife, Frances her husband; she once wrote to Frances that

‘in two or three years men are always weary of their wives and look for mistresses as soon as they can get them

Which does rather suggest the influence of Charles’ court in which she grew up.

So when it was proposed that she marry William, and met him in the Autumn of 1677, she was appalled. She was tall at 5 ft 11, passionate, young; he was much shorter at 5’ 6”. He had bad teeth, was very dark, and was emotionally very cold; her sister Anne called him Caliban behind his back.

But Danby had found the perfect time when William had a setback and needed allies in the negotiation with France, Charles was miffed with Louis and wanted some leverage to show Louis just how valuable he was and worth much better bribes – and so he agreed to the marriage, and an alliance with the Dutch. Mary was marrying a man most unlike her, a cousin and Charles’ nephew 12 years older than her, and she would have to leave home and live in the Netherlands. When told the news, she wept all that afternoon, and all the following day. She was married in her bedroom at 9 O’Clock at night, and she cried throughout that as well. Her experience of Charles’ court was good training. That night Charles and the court put them in their marriage bed, as was the custom, and Charles shouted out in a caring sensitive way

Now nephew do your work! Hey St George for England!

Classy. William took Mary’s friend Elizabeth Villiers, as his mistress after just two years of married bliss.

 

 

Now, since England and France, just the year before, had agreed not to make a separate alliances, and Charles had now made a separate  alliance with the Dutch Charles might have been prep[ared that Louis would be upset at what had turned out to be an outright lie. He did not seem to click, however, and sent a letter to Louis as an, um, honest broker, stating the peace terms William was offering to end the war, adding his own personal recommendation that they were great. Louis turned them down flat. Louis stopped his subsidy to Charles. Charles wept at the news.

Well, Danby and William at least now had what they wanted, and in January 1678, parliament was reconvened. Charles appeared very reluctant to go to war, especially against the French, but brother James was very keen, up for it, hot to trot, he liked being around exploding heads and blood spatter even if it was against his friends the French. And the logical thing to do anyway was to tool up for war, in the hope at the very least that would bring Louis to the negotiating table with a more positive attitude. So – the long and short is that parliament was asked for ships, cash and money for an army. Confidently. In a relaxed, ’this’ll be easy parliament have got all they wanted sort of way’. But blow me down of they didn’t make quite unreasonable demands – namely that the Spanish hand over Ostend as a bridgehead for any English army landing in Flanders.

While they were all arguing about this, Louis launched another attack, invested 5 key towns in the Spanish Netherlands and took two of them. Again Charles demanded money, this time the Commons suggested he negotiate. What are you doing thought Charles, who will rid me of this turbulent parliament? He also had found out that Louis was distributing bribes to both courtiers and MPs. He went ballistic and finally the Commons saw sense and raised a tax to allow him to raise an army for the war they had wanted in the Spanish Netherlands. About time too. You want war, you pay for war.

So that’s OK then. Charles went to war in support of the Dutch, the people loved him Louis retreated and everyone lived happily ever after.

Not.

Charles did indeed spend the money to raise an army, and put it under the command of Monmouth, his illegitimate son. But then to everyone’s astonishment no campaign was forthcoming; it seemed to the MPs that Charles and Danby were absolutely messing with them. The rumour went round from members of the Country party that his troops were not raised to make war on the Dutch – good lord no, how could that be? Because they had heard that Danby and Charles were really still in league with France. Those troops – they had been raised to impose royal tyranny on the English.

This was almost certainly not true. But the story flew and grew, because look wasn’t this exactly what was going on in Scotland? There, Lauderdale had talked his king into a new wave of suppression of the presbyterian dissenters in the SW of Scotland, and force them to accept the episcopal Church of Scotland imposed at the Restoration. And to make it all so much worse, he had raised the so-called Highland Host to enforce the policy. It looks like a carbon copy of the sort of strategy Louis XIV followed against the Huguenots in France; soldiers were quartered on communities and the families who refused to confirm, who stubbornly met in their chapels and conventicles to worship according to the presbyterian kirk. They lived off their hosts, robbed, stole, and bullied. To make it worse, the host inflamed all the longstanding prejudices lowland Scots held again Highlanders who they saw as alien, barbarian, and lawless; we are still some way from the time of Walter Scot and the conversion of the Highlander into the heart of Scottish identity.

Shaftesbury and chumps seized on this. Look, they said, here is England’s future too. Scotland, wrote Shaftesbury:

Hath outdone all the eastern and southern countries in having their lives, liberties and estates subjected to arbitrary will and pleasure of those that govern…till the pressure be fully taken off Scotland it is not possible to believe that good is meant to us here’

It’s good rhetoric. Again, almost certainly not true – and actually it was again Louis’ diplomacy which had done the job of delaying an Anglo Dutch campaign – by bribing an opposition party in the States General. Really that man was spider. Clever one though.

Now the politics and diplomacy get even more Byzantine. There was so much uproar against Charles and Danby, so many demands for immediate war, that in the Lords when faced with this Charles could hardly contain his fury at the sheer cheek of it – he turned pale and shook violently with rage. Not helped when the Dutch ambassador remarked he hardly knew whether to talk to king or parliament, and was hit by debris and grey stuff from Charles’ exploding head. James had a rather revealing suggestion at this point – that Charles just scrap parliament and rule with the help of his new army. Wow. I mean – wow with brass knobs and little fairy lights on. Charles followed the normal strategy of proroguing parliament, and proceeded to order Danby to make another deal with Louis to force the Dutch to make peace in return for £540,000. Danby informed William, and under the pressure peace negotiations were finally soon well advanced, and parliament was recalled. They reluctantly voted the king an extra £300,000 but only to be used to disband the army now since it wasn’t needed for external war, and now one wanted it used internally.

Are you getting all this? Answers on a postcard. I mean what next? It’s like Buster Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy, or an Ayckbourn farce.

Well what next is that the peace negotiations between France and the Dutch collapsed at the end of June, in July Charles stopped disbanding the army and agreed a deal with the Dutch to fight again, then when all was ready top launch, on 31^st July 1678 the Dutch and the French came to an agreement after all and signed the Treaty of Nijmegan with Charles nowhere. Louis refused to pay Charles his £540,000 because he’d broken the terms by again agreeing with the Dutch to fight against France. Given their general incompetence, dithering and double dealing both parties left England out of the deal.

Charles and Danby were left looking around them in complete confusion, thinking wistfully of how lovely 1677 had looked, and standing in possession of a political and diplomatic wreckage as comprehensive and complete as could be imagined. The Three Kingdoms were out in the cold, Lauderdale was under siege in Scotland, parliament was convinced both Danby and Charles had been double dealing all the way through, Shaftesbury was predicting popery and tyranny and people were listening. Meanwhile Charles had spent all the money voted for disbanding the military, on you know, stuff, and therefore had an a army for which he had neither the money to pay or to disband which looked like a flashing neon sign confirming every accusation Shaftesbury made.

What a mess! Into which – enter Titus Oates. Things were about to get a lot messier.

We will hear about those next time. Until then, may I remind members that happiness and personal fulfillment is to be found at the History of England App, to be found at the History of England.co.uk. Thank you everyone for listening to my and England’s tale, good luck, and have a great week.

[1] Healey, J: The Blazing World’ pp373-4