The Dutch raid on the Medway effectively brought the Second Anglo Dutchto an end, and also the honeymoon period. From 1667 to 1681, Charles sought to play off factions in parliament, to keep his freedom of action, enhance royal power where he could and court the French – their friendship, and bribes. The public announcement of James’ catholicism in 1677 became the driving factor in an increasingly unruly politics, of Whig and Tory. Until at the Oxford parliament in 1681, Charles chose one side – the Tory. He would never allow parliament to sit again.

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Transcript

In the last AAG we talked about the arrival of the famously merrie monarch, Charles II as the Stuarts were restored to the thrones of the Three Kingdoms. Generally speaking everyone was very enthusiastic to have an end to the chaos of the civil wars and prepared to settle down and get on with it. In Ireland the Catholic landowners who had fought for Charles found the land settlement niggardly, and the fault lines between old English, New English, Gaelic Irish and Scots Presbyterian were not dealt with, but nonetheless the country found an uneasy equilibrium, and the Duke of Ormonde was intelligent enough not to try and impose religious conformity on such a fractured society. In Scotland it was rather different; the nobility which recovered control made it quite clear they blamed the Covenanters and definitely held a grudge. They cracked down on Presbyterians, especially in their SW heartlands, brought back bishops and fell over themselves to prove their loyalty to their ancient royal line. Royal power became pretty close to absolute in Scotland under the king’s lieutenant, Red John, the Duke of Lauderdale.

In England, the Declaration of Breda survived to a degree, but was ripped up as far as religion was concerned by parliament, and a narrow, strict Anglican settlement imposed, which left precious little room for Catholic or Protestant dissenter.

Now we got to 1666, and the rebuilding of London after plague and fire, and we had heard about the start of the Second Anglo Dutch war. At the start of 1666 that took a darker turn, when King Louis of France finally publicly declared war on England in accordance with his alliance with the Dutch. That was a morale booster for them, though quite clearly Louis’ heart was not in it; actually, bubbling away, he had very different plans for the Dutch. Very different. It is possible Charles had an inkling of this, for he had very good links with the French court. He had spent some time there in exile, his French Mum was still alive, and in particular his little sister, Henrietta or Minette as he called her, was married to Louis XIV’s brother. And Minette was sharp, political and engaged and eager to bring her brother into alliance with the France he loved.

However, the Duke of York and the Navy were forced to take account of a potential French threat, and the two commanders Prince Rupert and George Monk, would you believe, now the Duke of Albermarle, were forced to split their squadrons. Which meant Monk was outgunned when he boldly attacked De Ruyter on 1^st June in the Channel, and so started a long running struggle for control of those vital waters – the Battle of Four Days as it is called, which is a useful, handy and informative way of naming battles, I commend it.

Four days it went on for what you believe; and Monk was clearly getting the worst of it. On the last day Rupert’s squadron managed to rejoin, but it could not change the result – a bad defeat, so that Pepys gloomily recorded in his diary

the Duke of Albemarle run away from the Dutch.

Thus, in all things, in wisdom, courage, force, knowledge of our own streams, and success, the Dutch have the best of us

The English had lost 20 ships to just 4 Dutch, with many more damaged. The flagship Royal Prince had been forced onto the Galloper, a famous sandbank, and George Ayescue, Admiral of the White surrendered, and thus became the highest ranking Naval officer ever to have surrendered. Fab fact.

The Dutch now controlled the Channel and made a blockade of the Thames, though De Ruyter rather fancied maybe being more audacious singing Elizabeth’s beard, by burning the famous naval dockyard at Chatham which she had established, and the heart of English naval construction. But it was their turn to be disappointed with the Fruits of victory, as the English navy recovered, and left the Thames in a line 10 miles long. And at the battle of St James day, wrested back control of the channel; followed by a nasty little raid on the town of Terschelling. So again – the year ended in a score draw. Another great effort was needed.

So when the Cavalier parliament reconvened in late 1666, the government blithely asked for another grant of £1.8m and got stonier response than Charles was used to. Maybe the honeymoon was over. Charles had a great faith in the Cavalier parliament and would refuse to hold a general election until 1679, but there were of course recruiter elections along the way as MPs died, and so its composition was changing slowly. And things were not good; London was a smouldering ruin and trade was up the spout, and there was an agrarian recession just to make things worse. All that money previously granted had been spent, without the promised victory, and meanwhile Charles’  court was beginning to shock MPs and the GBP.

 

 

 

 

It also transpired that £400k of the grants had disappeared into the King’s personal pockets, a slightly bizarre example of a king stealing from himself, and the excesses of court were legendary – let alone the king’s mistresses

Give the king the Countess of Castlemaine and he cares not what the nation suffers[1]

Sang a ballad. At some of the By Elections a new cry had been heard – ‘No Courtiers!’. There was a new mood.

Now, He was not a strategic thinker was Charles, he had no great plan for the country outside of maintaining the dignity of his crown and dynasty and having a blast. But give him his due. He was in touch, sensitive to the changing mood and vibe, and unlike his Dad capable of being flexible and adapting. One of his innovative ways of dealing with cost of living crisis vibe, was to publicly and loudly adopt a new form of dress for a while – dumping those fancy and expensive French silks for a simple long vest made of good honest English wool. ‘To teach the nobility thrift’ recorded Pepys and that my friend is cast iron, titanium plated nerve, fancy, Charles imagining he could teach the world thrift! However – this is said to be the father of the super famous English suit, so once again Charles wins.

He responded in other less happy ways to buy his new grant. He promised vigorous and active persecution of Catholics. I rather think Charles personally was no more than conventionally pious and had little if any passion for religious oppression, and if private religion was the only consideration, would have been happy enough for Catholics and dissenting protestants to do their thing. But never mind principles, this is politics; so, he would serially and relentlessly play the religion card whether that was cracking down on Catholic or Dissenters to get what he wanted. In addition, he had his mate the Duke of Buckingham introduce a frankly scurrilous Cattle Bill, banning the import of Irish Cattle to help English farmers. That had the Duke of Ormonde up in arms of fury. But it worked. He got his £1.8m.

So that’s £5.5m in supply over the last 3 years. Meanwhile the Dutch had spent twice that, £11m. And in 1667 that basic difference paid off. War was expensive – the Navy’s annual bills were £3.2m in wartime, seaman and contracts were left unpaid, interest rates were sky high, Pepys was horrified to see starving, unemployed seaman hanging around the Navy board; in March 1667 he wrote

This day a poor seaman, almost starved for food, lay in our yard a-dying

All this meant the fleet could not put to sea for the 1667 season – there was simply no money. So Charles came up with a plan with brother James – the big ships must stay in port, the smaller frigates only would go to sea, and hopefully the Dutch wouldn’t notice. It came as a bit of a shock to many of his ministers when this was announced in parliament – Charles had a habit of making decisions in private conversations and not telling anyone.

But given the dire situation, Clarendon meanwhile was desperately pressing for a peace treaty and negotiations with the Dutch were started; and Charles had an ace in his pocket to improve England’s negotiating leverage. Because he reached an secret agreement was signed with Louis, promising that England would not oppose a French attack on the Dutch. Makes sense; although most Englishmen were scared of France, its power, size and its absolutist king – my enemy is your enemy sort of thing.

And Louis XIV’s diplomatic reach was extraordinary, he was like an Octopus, with tentacles and agents in every pie. He had a whopping budget of £7.5m a year in normal times, seven times that of Charles’, and a fair proportion of it went on bribing politicians – including some many MPs that Andrew Marvell called it the Pensionary Parliament, not the Cavalier parliament – given bribes by both the French crown, and the English court. Louis had a permanent army of 180,000 which could grow to 400,000 in wartime, and it was good, professional with excellent generals, superb artillery and engineering.

Which he had decided to use in a good cause, and in May 1667 with Charles’ agreement dans sa poche he declared that contrary to popular belief he actually owned the Spanish Netherlands and the Franch Comte on the Rhine, and he had 400,000 hairy blokes who agreed, and marched into both of them. And into Catalonia. As De Witt, put it ‘to abandon Spain is to make France a present of the Netherlands’, which meant the Dutch were now at war with France. Charles licked his lips, and looked forward to a super favourable peace while the Dutch were forced to concentrate on their former ally, France. Possibly he dribbled.

 

 

 

 

At which point, in June, the Stuart monarchy presided over one of the greatest ever National humiliations in English military history. The Dutch sailed practically unopposed into Chatham dockyards on the River Medway, brushed aside the defences, sank 4 flagships and towed away the pride of the fleet, the Royal Charles. It became a tourist attraction back home and you can still see its coat of arms in the Rijks museum. Possibly worst of all, a load of underpaid, malnourished English sailors went back with the Dutch rather than fight to the death, yelling ashore gleefully

‘We did heretofore fight for tickets; now we fight for dollars!’.

The result, by the end of 1667, was the Treaty of Breda which reflected this Dutch victory – though we did hang on to New York. De Witt was confirmed in prestige over Charles’ favoured royalist Orangist faction. By 1668 Charles’ foreign policy did a 180 degrees turn, with the triple Alliance against France signed by the Netherlands, The three Kingdoms, and Sweden which reversed most of the gains Louis had made in his year-long war of Devolution on Spain. Trading in the reputation of the Stuart dynasty was brisk – a bear market as the brand took a beating.

The Public mood after the humiliation of Medway was not pretty. Someone had to take the blame for this state of affairs and, of course it wasn’t going to be the king, that would never do. King and public realised they were of one mind, actually, about whom the scapegoat should be, when the great English Public stormed a new, grand house in Piccadilly, London – called Clarendon house. They shouted their fury at Clarendon’s policy for which they claimed

Three sights to be seen: Dunkirk, Tangier and a Barren Queen[2]

They blamed Clarendon for the sale of Dunkirk; they blamed him for the marriage with Catherine of Braganza, which had brought the money pit that was Tangiers – and a queen who had failed to produce an heir. Charles was fed up with Clarendon too – he seemed to think he ran the place, and that was cheesing Charles off. He was not an easy man to sack – in the end Charles had to get his mate Buckingham, to bring an impeachment to the house of lords, and finally Clarendon ran to the south of France. There to write his great history of the Rebellion.

Foremost in the public mind now was France. They feared that Louis XIV’s money was everywhere, corrupting court and parliament – and they weren’t wrong, and Castlemaine herself was receiving a French pension of £1000 a year. For the English on the Clapham omnibus, France was massive, military, ambitious, led by a tyrannical king – and a Catholic one at that. Against them, the Dutch and all Protestant Europe looked desperately weak. And now for the first time the Earl of Shaftesbury voiced publicly a fear  – a fear that Charles was cut from the same cloth as Louis. And he saw in Charles’ reign in Scotland, a template. There, royal power seemed almost absolute, the king had a standing army – and repression of radical protestants was so harsh that the South West had risen in open rebellion in the Pentland rising followed by ever more killing and repression. Was Catholicism to be introduced next? Would Scotland provide the playbook for England?

Popery and slavery, like two little sisters, go hand in hand…In England popery was to have brought in slavery. Whereas in Scotland slavery went before and popery was to follow

It is pretty much impossible to identify a strategy in Charles’ mind after the debacle of 1667 until 1670; but maybe it lies in convincing enough sections of society that their best hope of stability lay in royal authority. The Anglicans in parliament must be kept onside with a Dutch alliance; Dissenters and Catholics must realise that their salvation lay not in parliament but in the royal prerogative. So in England the Conventicle Act, suppressing dissenters’ right to worship was allowed to lapse, in Scotland he issued a royal declaration of indulgence. He would enlist the support of Catholics and Dissenters to build royal authority.

The trouble was that trust between king and parliament was breaking down. Charles did nothing to rebuild the royal reputation after the Medway disaster. So Parliament grimly pursued its suspicion that their money had been spent on corruption, not on the navy and would not be denied – at one stage Charles even tried to take forward a proposal of Union between England and Scotland, hoping to bolster his position in parliament with an influx of Loyal Scottish MPs. But the excesses of court spread distrust to all corners.

There was the expense of Barbara Castlemaine and her family still; but she has been supplanted now in Charles’ primary affections. Pepys loved the theatre which had famously revived with the Restoration, and in 1665 he noticed

the King and my Lady Castlemayne were there; and pretty witty Nell

Before long Nell had been brought into court as another of Charles’ mistresses, but it was not she that had topped Castlemaine; that was the French noblewoman she called ‘Squintabella’ – Louise de Keroualle. It was not just the morality, excess and expense of all these mistresses now then; Louise de Keroualle was a French Catholic, and they feared her influence.

So it has come to the time for that rude poem, capital T, by the Earl of Rochester. Brace! Brace! :

His scepter and his prick are of a length

And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other

And make him little wiser than his brother.

Poor Prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,

Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.[3]

….

Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,

A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

It’s ironic that the Merry Monarch thing, so much part of the positive modern popular narrative about Charles, was born in a poem expressing disgust and distrust. Nor were these things hidden in secret behind the walls of the Palace., everyone knew what was going on; a crowd famously mobbed the royal chariot when they thought Keroualle was inside, only for Nell to stick her head cheerily out of the window and laugh

Pray, good people, be civil; I am the Protestant whore!

She was  a hoot by all accounts, was Nell. Charles, however, was not to be waylaid by the feelings of the English people. While he was outwardly promising to parliament that he would deliver solidarity with the Dutch and Protestants everywhere, his heart was in France. And with the help of his sister Minette and the closest of his ministers, he was negotiating an alliance with Louis, not to make war on him. There was much to attract Charles by a French alliance, practical stuff, not just his cultural affinity. France was powerful; it could take down De Witt’s republican government, responsible for dealing with the Commonwealth back in the day, and re-install the House of Orange in its rightful position. And Charles was always one for aristocratic and royal power. Plus – Louis would be prepared to pay for his support. The result, after Minette came to England to visit in 1670, was the Treaty of Dover.

Its public provisions were unpopular enough – Charles would break the Protestant triple alliance, and be paid £230,000 by Louis to provide an army of 4,000 to land in the Netherlands under the command of Charles’ illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and also 60 ships. The Secret treaty was dynamite. It was a straightforward bribe – Charles would convert to Catholicism; he would be paid £200,000 for his immortal soul, which seems rather steep to be fair. If there was trouble, rebellion or some such or riots, then Louis would provide 6,000 troops to help him subjugate his own people.

The secret clause won’t become public until 1771 and it’s a good thing for Charles it took a hundred years. In the parliament of 1670-1671, Charles dealt cleverly with Parliament’s opposition; he threw the Dissenters under the bus again to bribe the Anglican majority to swallow alliance with France, allowing another repressive Conventicles Act to pass, harsher than before; and he carefully spiked the discussions about corruption by holding them under his own eyes in the Lords, and killed them. Then he prorogued parliament for an unusually long time – until 1673.

That gave him space for his bold Great Game – to sweeten the bitter pill of French alliance by turning the national head with glittering martial victories. Almost immediately, in March 1672 he did a 180 turn and issued a royal declaration of Indulgence, once more suspending the penal laws against Dissenters and Catholics. His message was clear – your protection relies on the royal prerogative alone, parliament is not your friend, give me your loyalty and support my foreign wars. He ordered a stoop on the exchequer – no bills would be paid at all for a year. The money instead would be used in all out roll of the dice – to win big, by France’s side to win glorious naval victories, land an army in the Netherlands and capture key towns for England, and bring the House of Orange into power. One year for a blaze of glory to sweep aside the inevitable storm of objections by parliament and the people. The fleet set out to sea, the army was recruited and waited on the Kent coast for news of their victory so they could invade. It’s 1672. The Third Anglo Dutch War, and the Franco Dutch war, were a GO.

Louis swept all before him. Rampjaar, 1672, the Year of Disaster it is called in The Netherlands. Fortress after fortress fell, right up to the edge of Amsterdam stormed the French, the city was at his mercy – when the plan Maurice of Nassau had put in place decades before was activated – the sluices were opened, the north sea cascaded onto the flat lands, flooding the countryside and stopping the French in their tracks – at enormous cost. While the French symbolically celebrated mass in the Calvinist Cathedral, the Domkirk in Utrecht, De Witt was thrown out – killed by the mob – and eaten according to some accounts – and William of Orange was appointed as saviour in this hour of desperate need. The Sun King was shining.

The Merrie monarch’s experience was…not so merrie. The Duke of York led his fleet of 80 ships to prepare the ground for invasion; and at the Battle of Solebay, de Ruyter’s smaller fleet drove them away. All through that year the Dutch remained in control of their coastline, whatever the English Navy tried, and Monmouth and his men waited, and played dice on the coast. Charles had rolled the dice and come up craps. The stop on the exchequer was coming to an end parliament was needed to vote money to pay the bills to continue this war, and Charles had no glorious victory to sweep objections aside.

The first parliament of 1673 was a momentous one. Most obviously because Charles was forced to pay a heavy and humiliating price to get the money he needed for one more year. Was he politically astute? Actually he went in, guns blazing, blaming parliament for causing the debacle by being mean with money. That didn’t work. On the other hand, Charles did get his money £1½m of it – but was forced to demonstrate his political flexibility, making the kind of climbdown his father would never have contemplated. He was forced to withdraw his Royal Declaration of Indulgence. The Commons were explicit about why; he must withdraw the act because it had been an expression of arbitrary power, and that no such act could be passed without parliamentary approval. Charles’ attempt to establish prerogative power over religion, and persuade Dissenters to see royal absolute power as their saviour had crashed, and it had burned. His brother would try again one day.

But there was more – the Test Act of 1673. To hold public office an oath was now required committing to the Anglican religion in all respects  – an oath no Dissenter or Catholic could take in conscience. The immediate impact of this act was that James Duke of York, heir to the throne and all, resigned his post as Lord Admiral. Charles was in all likelihood shocked at his brother’s principled stand – he’d assumed he’d just hide it, but James was cut from a different cloth. Within a few months, James had also announced his marriage to Mary of Modena – a Catholic queen. James’ religion and the public knowledge of it, will be the engine that will drive the fierce religious and political divisions of the next decade.

The war resumed, and the war went badly on land for Louis as William of Orange drove the French out of the Netherlands, other countries joined an alliance against French aggression, and there followed a war of grinding attrition around the borders of the Spanish Netherlands, with Spain joining a Dutch alliance. Prince Rupert took command of the English fleet, and once more failed to drive de Ruyter from the seas. The Duke of Monmouth and his troops never sailed, and in 1673 a humiliating peace was signed at Westminster with the Dutch. Charles’s great game had failed. He would start wearing French silks again, and negotiate constantly with Louis for additional bribes in return for diplomatic support and even get some of it – but England was cut out of the final peace of Nijmegen five years later in 1678.

Charles withdrew a bit from politics after the debacle of the Medway in 1667; and withdrew a bit more after the crashing and burning of 1673, especially in the summer months which he spent more at Windsor. But he left a good man in control, who would be his leading minister for 5 years and construct a system around him. I speak of Thomas Osborne, soon to be the Earl of Danby and given the breadth and depth of power he established, he has a claim to be England’s first Prime Minister, well before Robert Walpole in the 1720s. He was a bombastic sort of man, described as haughty, and he lacked the charm and charisma you might expect from such a successful political leader. But he was deeply competent, and like Walpole will establish his reputation by sorting out the finances, clearing up the mess left by the stop of the exchequer. And unlike his boss, he is a man with a strategy, and a vision of how to get Charles’ Dynastic project back on track, to recover from the dreadful reputation of his court, and his military humiliations. The Status of the Stuart dynasty in 1673 was summed up in this political poem:

The isle was well reformed and gain’d renown

Whilst the brave Tudors wore th’imperial crown

But since the Stewarts came

it has recoiled to popery and shame

 

Dandy’s vision is this; Charles must form a partnership with the majority in his nation and his parliament. The majority were fiercely Anglican, deeply suspicious of France for its absolutist government which they believed went hand in hand with its Catholicism. They therefore believed firmly in a protestant alliance with the Dutch, and they were conservative – they believed in their hereditary Stuart monarchy, but also the rule of law within which the king should operate. Danby and the people that thought as he did will be referred to by 1681 as Tories.

Danby based Charles’ government on this ideas. In finances he will be extraordinarily successful. Partly through his efforts to make administration more efficient, but also partly because England, and Ireland to an extent are entering a period of great prosperity. Improvements in methods helped agrarian growth, and government revenues will grow from customs dues driven by healthy trade – and Ireland will provide a helpful surplus as well. Normal income grew from £900k a year to £1.3m, plus the little back handers from Louis those helped of course. As long as he steered away from any more disastrous wars and followed Danby’s plan, Charles would be fine.

 

 

 

 

Part of that income was also driven by maintenance and enforcement of the Anti Catholic penal laws, and fines and restrictions on Dissenters; Danby would have no truck with the likes of Bishop Henry Compton, who wanted a broad Anglican church which could incorporate protestant Dissenters – Latitudinarians as these moderates they were called. In the mind of Danners and his High Anglicans, religious Dissent = political sedition and a threat to the Established church. In parliament, his tactic, was to build a court party, a solid block of loyalists – and he would use shameless corruption of money and jobs to build this system. His party of MPs would be stiffened with a spine of court placemen – people who owed their living to royal patronage, be they offices, honours or pensions. Andrew Marvell’s Pensionary Parliament again. By the late 1670’s Danby reckoned he could count on 150 MPs out of 500 in the Commons, and the Lords was even more solid, especially with the 26 Anglican Bishops.

He had two major problems. One was the king. Charles bought into most of Danby’s System. In particular, one of Danby’s master strokes was to commission Bishop Compton to carry out a survey of the religion of his people. The results showed that the English and Welsh were solidly Anglican; less than 1% were Catholic, less than 6% Dissenters. This amazed Charles; Dissenters made so much noise – so much noise with pamphleting and protesting, everyone assumed they were much bigger. Suddenly Charles realised he had no need to conciliate either Catholics or Dissenters – their numbers were feeble.

He went along with everything – except the anti French bit. That, he could not bring himself to quite swallow. Over Danby’s outrage and protest, Charles would force his prime minster to engage in secret negotiations with the French, and England’s king would receive several French bribes in return for his neutrality in France’s wars against Spain and the Dutch. Only in 1677 will Danby meet with some success in bringing rapprochement with the The Netherlands.

Danby’s other problem was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury. He has a chequered career – a small man with a permanent disability with his liver than meant he wore a drain – Tapski his enemies called him no problem with Body Shaming in the 17^th century. At times he works as a minister for Charles, and because of this has been seen by some as nothing more than an ambitious opportunist. But unlike many others, even those on his own side, he never takes Louis’s bribes and pensions. His protégé John Locke will write, although not publish, his foundational text of Liberalism at this time – the Two Treatises of Government. Locke described his patron as

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

Shaftesbury believed deeply that sovereignty resides in the people, not a divinely appointed monarch, and that government was based on a social contract with the people. If the king broke that contract, the people had a right of resistance.

Like Marvell, Shaftesbury and his supporters looked at politics and religion in Europe, and concluded that Catholicism and Absolutism went hand in hand. They suspected Charles, and even Danby, of aiming

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

They believed in a broad protestant church, the primacy of parliament based on a social contract, an active Protestant foreign policy, and one that promoted trade and commerce. The party and people that share Shaftesbury’s views, will soon be called the Whigs. Before the death of Charles this basic division of Whig and Tory, which will survive for 200 years or more, will be normalised, political parties born in what would be called the Rage of Party.

 

However what really supercharged Shaftesbury and his supporters, was the prospect of a Catholic monarch, James II. And given his new Catholic wife, maybe there would be a male Catholic successor in the future, replacing his protestant children and current heirs Mary and Anne, in the royal succession.

 

 

 

 

Shaftesbury makes sure that Danby doesn’t have it all his own way. He builds a coalition within the Commons, combining Dissenters, with religious moderates who wanted some latitude and toleration, Whigs who wanted controls monarchical, all the way through to out and out Good Old Causers,  Republicans like the political philosopher Algernon Sidney. One powerful weapon that helps keeps this disparate group together, is the distrust that Charles and Danby created with their Court party. A group of MPs they saw as corrupted into political slavery by the lifestyle, excesses and riches of the king and his amoral court, the French mistresses that warped him to Louis’ side. In opposition they piously believed they represented a sort of bluff, honest, down to earth, morality and values of the good ole Country gent. And so another basic division in English and British politics is born – court and country. The badge of each of those sides will be alternately attached to Whig and Tory as power changes hands, but for now is firmly with the Whigs.

Shaftesbury was successful in selling his message in parliament, and although he could not bring Danby down, nor force a new election to overturn the Cavalier parliament, his campaigning ensured mistrust of Charles’ motives remained widespread. Consistently Charles failed to get parliamentary support for subsidies and grants. He was prepared to pander to anti Catholic prejudice by promising crackdowns and rigorous enforcements of the penal laws, but stubbornly resisted alliance with the Dutch until 1677, when Danby pulled off a coup.

It was a low point in Charles and Louis’s relationship, where Louis was finding it difficult to see any value for fresh bribes. He decided a marriage and alliance between Stuart and the House of Orange would give him leverage with France and with his own parliament. And so on 4^th November 1677, a weeping, devasted Mary Stuart married a sullen and gloomy William of Orange, and parliament finally voted a grant to Charles to recruit an army – for use against France as they thought.

And yet although soldiers were recruited – yet a war against France did not start. This, thundered Shaftesbury, was the Standing Army of the would-be tyrant. All they had to do was look north to Scotland – where the king’s Highland Host had terrorised the protestants in SW Scotland. And when in 1678 the Peace of Nijmegen between the Dutch, French and Spanish took the idea of war off the table, yet the army was not disbanded. But anyway in 1679, the political world exploded.

Two events caused the hysteria that now gripped England. A charlatan called Titus Oates made wild accusations about a plot by Catholics to assassinate the king, put the Catholic James on the throne and impose Popish tyranny on the hapless English. A series of remarkable co-incidences turned this pack of lies and half truths into what began to seeM like a proven fact. The JP investigating the case was found murdered – actually he probably committed suicide. A royal Catholic physician Oates had accused was actually found to have sent letters to Louis. Another popish plot, the Meal Tub plot was apparently discovered – every bit as dicey as the Oates’ plot as it will turn out. A series of trials and executions of Catholics and Jesuits started, and Shaftesbury and the Whigs rode the wave, trying to impeach Danby and pressurizing king and Privy Council to dissolve the cavalier parliament at last and call fresh elections.

The final blow came in a parliamentary session where an MP, seeking revenge against Charles’ old flame Barbara Castlemaine, made a shock revelation in parliament; that he had letters proving Danby was a double dealer. That while he had been promising war against the French he’d actually been negotiating deals of friendship with them. No matter that Danby had been furious with Charles for forcing him to do it, against his express strategy – as far as Parliament was concerned, Danby was a two faced Frenchie lover. As demands for his impeachment rose like a Tsunami, Charles at last, and in desperation, dissolved the Cavalier parliament.

Now, Charles, Danby and the court – and many generations of historians – were sceptical about the importance of popular opinion in the 17^th century, and sceptical if the voice people made more than a ha’pporth of difference. All the power surely lay with the elites, the nobility, the gentry, the ecclesiastical lords, and the City. These were the only people that mattered.

Well, they might have remembered the English Revolution. Shaftesbury will remind them. Right from 1671 and the long prorogation of parliament, Shaftesbury mobilised popular opinion like none other. Clubs are formed up and down the country; some like the Green Ribbon club, riff on the colour of the Levellers and the aims of the civil war Commonwealthmen. They organised petitions, and printed leaflets and letters to support them centrally, versions and adapted in each regions to be laced with local issues. There were vitriolic pamphlet campaigns, and street protests. From 1675, November 5^th, and also the celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s accession on 17^th – well, these there  wild occasions. Vast processions, bonfires and effigies of the pope which were burned to wild cheers.

So Calling an election turned out to be a mistake. As the campaigns proceeded, Charles gloomily remarked that a dog could be elected if it stood against a courtier. The new parliament was uncompromising. It immediately went after Danby, and a reluctant Charles was forced to commit him to the Tower – where he would stay until 1684. They then passed a bill of Habeas Corpus to restrict the king’s ability to bang his opponents in jail without trial. But then came the big one – a bill to exclude James from the succession. The exclusion crisis had started.

This was incendiary; Charles would never accept an interruption to the hereditary principle, which to the mind of any good monarch was ordained by God. If parliament was allowed to dictate such a thing that was an explicit recognition that monarchy was elective, a social contract. Now Shaftesbury pursued the Exclusionist line, despite possible other options. Charles himself, with his famous political flexibility, suggested the idea of specific controls on a Catholic monarch. Trouble is  there could be no guarantee any monarch would stick to them. Some suggested Charles dump Queen Catherine and marry again – but that he would not contemplate. Or there was the Protestant Duke – Monmouth; might he be made legitimate and the king’s heir? Once more, Charles would admit of no messing with God’s ordained plan. And for Shaftesbury anyway, compromise was not an option; full exclusion it must be. It was simple; and it confirmed that the monarch was subject to the will of the people.

The First Exclusion bill passed the Commons on 21^st May 1679 with a majority of 79. It came to the Lords, and everyone knew it could not pass. But Charles was done with this; he dissolved parliament to give people time to cool down; new elections called for September, with the hope that heads would indeed be cooler, for which read, more Tory.

They weren’t. At the hustings, cries were heard of ‘No Popish Clergy’…and ‘No Courtier, No Pensioner’. Tory opponents fought back by invoking images of the civil wars – ‘1641 is come again’ they warned, and the whole idea of forgetting the Revolution had ever happened was gone – once more the language of Cavalier and Roundhead was in the air. A rebellion by Radical protestants in Scotland was viciously put down by the Edinburgh government with torture and executions, allowing Shaftesbury to warn that this kind of repression could happen down here, in England and Wales. And meanwhile the trial and conviction of Catholics accused by Titus Oates continued; by the end 22 totally innocent Catholics would have been judicially murdered in a hysteria that went right to the top of the judiciary. Whigs were talking openly of Monmouth as the natural solution, and Monmouth now was openly supporting the whig cause. So when the election results were in, clearly the result was every bit as bad as in March. Charles immediately prorogued parliament until January, and then in January did the same again. This was a parliament he did not want to hold.

For a year from 1679, Shaftesbury and his allies did everything in their power to force the king to allow parliament to meet – a blizzard of processions, petitions, bonfires and pope burnings. In  December 16 peers presented a petition to Charles, and the London streets were crammed with cheering crowds. A so called ‘Monster Petition’ was presented in January with 16,000 names – Charles received it with contempt, and sent a proclamation banning any more petitions from the people – that was not their job he said. And yet petitions from several counties still came in. In June 1680 Shaftesbury had the nerve to go to court accusing James Duke of York of Recusancy, demanding a trial, confident that all the officials in London, sheriffs and jurymen, were Whigs. Only with great difficulty did Charles rush back to London, and get the case stopped.

Eventually, Charles was forced to give way; he had learned the power of popular protest the hard way. He opened parliament by trying to distract the Commons away from Exclusion, and put that behind them all; but immediately a second Exclusion bill was passed in the Commons. This time it was only defeated in the Lords because Charles sat there watching, grimacing and smiling, growling and cheering with every speech according to its nature, lunch brought to him in a cabinet so he didn’t have to take his eyes off them for a minute. Again he prorogued parliament, and this time reconvened it to Oxford – for the last parliament ever to sit outside London, by the way.

Charles arrived in Oxford in March 1681, at the height of the Exclusion crisis, and Shaftesbury was confident that his Third exclusion bill would again put Charles and James under pressure. But unknown to him, Charles had come with a new strategy.

 

9PLAXCE GAP? 50:56

 

 

 

He had decided that Danby was right in seeing Dissenters as the enemy, who combined religious division with political sedition. They were not be reconciled, they could not be suborned into a royal alliance – so they were to be crushed. Secondly he understood that the popular voice did indeed count; he must use those same tools of propaganda to build the Tory case, to build a new sense of hysteria – the fear of the violence and division of the civil wars come again, the monarchy and all order destroyed – if the Whigs were not stopped. Finally, all the institutions that could sustain the whigs must be purged and made Tory – the judiciary, the JPs of the shires, the borough councils and sheriffs.

His brother James’ view at this time is also quite interesting. This was not really about his religion he said – it was about the nature of monarchy.

‘matters were come to such a head that the monarchie must be either more absolute or quite abolished’

Well, THAT’s interesting!

Charles also had an Ace in his hand; he had just signed a treaty with France assuring English neutrality in any war – for which Louis had paid him £385,000 over three years. Together with the rising customs dues, Charles was now financially secure; as long as he didn’t start a war, he had no need of parliament anyway.

But first of all – Oxford. As he arrived Charles’ heart lifted at the enthusiastic welcome from the town people. But parliament started in the same old way – with a proposal for a bill to exclude James from the throne. So the next day, commons and Lords were summoned to an audience with the king.  There he sat in full regalia of state. And to everyone’s astonishment after just 1 week – he curtly dissolved parliament with a single sentence, and left, surrounded by his guards. He would never allow another parliament to sit.

What followed the Oxford parliament was the most decisive political programme of Charles’ reign; gone was the political caution, the tactical flexibility and trimming; gone were the blunders that had ended in his humiliating political reverses in 1667 and 1673. The pretensions of parliament in daring to interfere with the divinely ordained nature of the royal succession was not to be tolerated. Dissenters and the whigs were the enemy and must be destroyed.

Interestingly, he had a nice example of what the ideal situation might look like. In 1680, he had sent James to Scotland, largely to get him out of the public eye; and it turned out he was rather a success. They loved him up there, and consciously and publicly declared they would demonstrate to their southern neighbours the right way to behave towards their monarch. They passed an Act of Supremacy, specifically declaring the divine nature of royal rule and succession. They passed their own Test act, requiring office holders to acknowledge the monarch as head of both church and state. This was something no old covenanter could do; and the result was that the most powerful of the Highland lords refused to take it, and fled for safety to the Netherlands. This was Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll , and he would join a growing collection of would be rebels, waiting for their chance to return and bring the Stuart dynasty down. Since the Campbells had been the royal enforcers in the western Highlands and islands, James needed to replace them; and he made a deal with the heads of the other clans, and his unusually collaborative approach would earn him their gratitude and loyalty – which would have consequences when his time came to rule.

Charles had learned the importance of public opinion and winning the war of words. As soon as the Oxford parliament had been contemptuously dismissed, a Royal Proclamation was read from every pulpit in the Country setting out his reasons for the dissolution, explaining the basis of royal power and starting the war of words. The attempt to forget the English Revolution was over, now it was brought forward as a weapon; the Whig movement was just the old Revolution revived, and

Who cannot but remember that religion, liberty and property were all lost when the monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that restored

The campaign to win hearts and minds would continue; the royal Censor, Roger L’Estrange led a pamphleting war of Tory writers, laying out the argument that the exclusionists were seditious radicals, and religious schismatics out to destroy the church, monarchy and right order. He pumped out pamphlets and articles, and published fellow Tory authors. And meanwhile implemented the censorship laws against whig writers with enthusiasm, prosecuting printers with all his might, raiding the print shops who dared published whig books, seizing kit and closing businesses down. Elizabeth Calvert, who ran the Black Spread Eagle book and print shop, was relentlessly harassed. A  printer’s wife, Jane Curtis, was prosecuted for singing  a ballad, ‘Song on the Downfall of the Whigs’.

It worked. ‘Remember the 41!’ was the cry, and it was now Tory street protests and processions that filled the streets, with cries of

No bill of Exclusion! No Whig

With bonfires, of course. The king and Tories found a willing audience among the people. They dreaded the return of the civil wars, and were passionately attached to the church around which the life of every parish was ordered, and feared the demands of Dissenters almost as much as they feared the idea of a Catholic conspiracy.

Charles targeted key individuals; Shaftesbury of course first, and brought a case against him for treason. The trouble was that a search turned up no convincing evidence; this was not necessarily an problem, but the bigger issue was that the Sheriffs were Whig, so they picked whig juries who would not convict. That would have to be dealt with. But meanwhile they did bag a whig writer and polemicist Stephen College – convicted and executed for supposedly plotting to seize the king.

But cutting the heads off was one thing – what was needed was to grub up the weed by the roots. A comprehensive purge was carried out of the Justices of the Peace in the shires, who controlled so much local government; whigs were removed. Most town councils were also controlled by whigs; and a pincer movement dealt with that. The Test Acts were now rigorously applied as they had not been before – removing dissenters from Councils. At the same time Charles looked in the history books at Edward I’s campaign to recover royal rights back in the 13^th century; and writs of Quo Warranto flooded the town halls and corporations demanding paperwork confirming their rights. If they didn’t have them, they were issued new, Pro Tory ones; if they did, a friendly Judge like George Jeffreys was on hand to explain why it was illegal, and here’s this new one. Now if Shaftesbury could be found, the right kind of jury would be called by reassuringly Tory London sheriffs.

Shaftesbury of course was nowhere to be seen, flitting from house to house in secret. And now he gathered together a group of colleagues who almost certainly did plan a real rebellion – including the old Leveller John Wildman, the Republican Algernon Sidney – and even the king’s own illegitimate Son, the Duke of Monmouth. But plan after plan was abandoned until in desperation Shaftesbury fled to Amsterdam – there to die in January 1638. John Locke also fled, and kept working on his philosophical works on what he called De Gallo Morbo – The French disease, absolutism.

But the group left behind did finally put a firm plan together – they would kidnap Charles on his way back from the races at Newmarket. In March 1683 he would have to pass by one of the conspirator’s houses – Rye House. He would be captured, assassinated and his son Monmouth placed on the throne – a Protestant James. All was ready – but then there was a fire, the king came home early, he was missed. Before they could plan again, the Rye House plotters were betrayed, and arrested.

The discovery of the Rye House plot led to a public reaction that destroyed the Whig cause, killed it stone dead. Crowds watched as Algernon Sidney, a relic of the English Revolution, was executed and William Russell followed. Over 283 loyal addresses to the King flooded in from around the country, street demonstrations hung effigies of Jack Presbyter on the gallows, and then burned them, singing God Save the King and the Duke of York.

Where no evidence of treason for trials of Whigs could be found which would mean the death penalty, such as with Titus Oates and John Hampden, a common device was used – to levy so high a fine that they would never escape prison again and would die there. A similar approach was used with the most feared of the Dissenting groups – the Quakers, and it’s thought over 400 Quakers died in prison.

And finally there was Monmouth. Charles agreed to try and reconcile with his son; on condition Monmouth confessed his treason, which he eventually did in private. But when he was called to give public evidence in the trial of John Hampden, that was too much – and he too, fled to the Netherlands to be welcomed by William of Orange, and plot his return, with fire and sword.

Charles enjoyed his last few years, he really was merry. He had money from trade and from Louis, and so no longer needed to call parliament. There was a kicker – he could never go to war, else he’d be in his Dad’s shoes, and the Stuart’s status internationally inevitably reduced. And since I mention Charles I, it’s often said how different the Merrie Monarch was from his austere, disciplined and highly principled dad, and that is of course true in many ways. But I might note that there is a remarkable similarity to where they ended up. Both were incapable of creating a consensus and lead parliament, both were incapable in the end of working with a range of different political positions. Instead, they ended up leading an exclusive party; both rejected parliament and governed without their national assembly in the end.

Charles’s agonizing last illness came as a shock in February 1685; he’d always been such a vigorous man. It’s not quite clear what killed him, but kidney failure is suspected, and the doctors made it much, much worse. In his last hours, James persuaded him to call a Catholic priest – old father Huddleston who had sheltered him after Worcester, and was secretly spirited up the back stairs. Charles was taken into the Catholic church, and given the last rites, before he died on 6^th February. His last words were not about ‘not letting poor Nelly starve’, nor did he pray for his country; he did ask James to look after his two mistresses Louise and Nell.

Well that’s the end of the Merrie Monarch. Merrie for himself, much less for his people and country was my conclusion. Jonathan Healey sums it up to a degree in his book The Blazing World when he says

He is remembered for his parties rather than the Quakers who died in his prisons, or the Scots Presbyterians who were tortured by his soldiers, or the slaves who suffered at the hands of the Royal African Company.

The issue, I guess, is that if I or any of you had met him, it’s very likely we’d had really liked him and enjoyed his company. He was brave, energetic, a great raconteur and a bit of a wit. My most attractive image of him, oddly, remains his flight from England in his youth, when there he is, completely defeated, life in chaos, trapped on Jersey chased by soldiers – and yet he gets himself a yacht and takes off sailing round the island. He was extraordinarily resilient, staying cheerful even in times of enormous crisis.

But he was also brutal, selfish and self centred, quite able to desert his ministers and servants, awful to his wife, a sort of moral vacuum. The stuff with France I find quite remarkable – why is that not the one fact that everyone remembers about him? The stuff about religion is interesting; clearly not a man who believed with any passion about religious liberty, but one who equally saw no point in religious persecution – unless it served his political purpose. He’s often thought of as a clever politician; and Yes, he was flexible, but he rarely drove the debate, he was reactive and he was no strategist. Charles was actually at his most politically impressive, strategic and focussed, in his worst moments, his brutal and relentless drive to expunge the whigs. He had one massive advantage over his Dad – no one, but no one, wanted the civil wars back again.

That meant he bequeathed James with, on the face of it, a very good hand indeed. Income exceeded expenditure, and handsomely – I can’t remember the last monarch who got to say that. He had a standing army on hand for any local problems, there was apparently great stability and support for the monarchy – and royal power had been considerably extended into the boroughs. But look a little deeper, and the story is less rosy. During his reign, a deep fissure had re-opened in society and politics, had acquired a name and become normalised; Whig and Tory. Until that was resolved, none of the Three kingdoms could rest easy.

Ok, that is it. As ever with At a Gallop there is so much I left out – loads of stuff about the Royal Society, the rebirth of theatre, growing industrialisation and even the story of William Penn – so do please do check out episodes 432 to 448. But next time on AAG – James VII and II will face the conclusion of this part of the Revolutionary period, which in the eyes of some will be glorious, and in others will not be.

Until then, everyone, thank you so much your listening, it’s lovely of you, do take time  to cpmment and get involved, it’s always good to hear from people. Until then, good luck everyone – and have a great week of fun and laughter.

 

 

 

 

[1] Hutton, R: ‘Charles II’, p234

[2] Jackson, C: Deviland’, p409

[3] https://jacklynch.net/Texts/charles2.html