CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A King at Chess

So I have seen a King at Chess

(His Queens and Bishops in distress)

Shifting about, growing less and less

With here and there a pawn.

Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, 1680

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parliament was not the only front where the royal authority was directly threatened. In Scotland, the murder of Archbishop Sharp on 13 May meant that the precarious peace there could no longer be maintained. Archbishop Sharp had gratuitously attacked the Covenanters for what were undoubtedly sincere religious beliefs, but, as with all acts of terrorism, the shocking nature of the deed shifted the balance: the Archbishop was dragged from his coach and hacked to pieces in front of his daughter’s eyes. In June the government’s forces, under John Graham of Claverhouse, were defeated by the Covenanters, and had the rebels now not indulged in the eternal sport of Scottish dissidents, internal bickering, their cause might well have flourished outwardly, as it did in the hearts of the Scottish people. As it was, the main outcome of the Scottish insurrection, from the English point of view, was a change in the position of Monmouth.

The dashing young ‘Protestant Duke’ was presented with a nice opportunity to shine when he was despatched north to command the loyal militia. He was appointed Captain General. It was Monmouth’s finest hour. Not only was he officially responsible for the government’s triumph at Bothwell Brig on 22 June, but he also issued instructions for mercy thereafter, understanding the essentially harmless nature of most Conventiclers. As the ‘clement victor’ in Scotland, Monmouth acquired a kudos which his actions at the English Court had not brought him.

Meanwhile, the English Parliament had passed one Act which should have been enough to immortalize it – had anyone at the time realized the consequences of what they were doing.⁴ This was the Act since known as Habeas Corpus, and widely regarded as one of the cornerstones of English civil liberty. At the time it was loosely known as ‘Shaftesbury’s Act’, but that did not mean that Shaftesbury alone understood what was involved: the Act caused little stir with anyone at the time when it was passed, slipping on to the Statute Book, rather than marching on to it in glory.

Previously, a writ of Habeas Corpus, as the Latin indicates, had required the body of a person to be brought by his jailer before a judge or into court; its advantage lay in the fact that, once the aforesaid person was produced, the nature of his custody – lawful or otherwise – could be investigated. So far, so good. But recently there had been extraordinary difficulties made over the granting of writs. Once granted, the difficulties were not over: as many as three writs had on occasion been needed for the prisoner to be produced. Nor was bail necessarily granted thereafter. Political detainees were not the only ones to suffer: those on criminal charges were subject to the same ordeal.

One of the questions asked was whether any court other than the Court of the King’s Bench had the right to issue such a writ. Then there was the whole issue of imprisonment at the King’s command – that is, by royal warrant. To suggest the abolition of this was a clear attack on one aspect of the royal prerogative. But by the end of the debate MPs were merely demanding the abolition of various abuses to do with this type of imprisonment. Equally, the Act of 1679 simply specified that there were to be no delays in granting the writ, without touching on the question of the courts involved. In effect, all parties had shied away from the issue of the royal warrant, which was really at the centre of the abuse.

It showed how little the significance of the Act was understood that the King himself was mildly favourable towards it. He saw it as a useful means of protecting Danby and the imprisoned Catholic lords – the latter, at least, the victims of a tyrannical incarceration quite as arbitrary as anything a Stuart monarch could provide. There is also a persistent story that the Act only passed through the House of Lords as a result of a piece of impudence on the part of the teller, who boldly counted one exceptionally stout peer as ten. Be that as it may, 31 Chas II was duly entered on the Statute Book.

Then Parliament was duly prorogued. The King was under no illusions on the subject of Exclusion. He was aware that the reassembly of Parliament would be rapidly followed by a return – probably successful – to the painful subject of the Bill. Having granted himself a breathing-space, he cast his thoughts, as before, towards means of ruling without this tiresome assembly.

Renewed negotiations – or intrigues, as the opposition would have termed them – with France was one answer. Charles II had never yet turned to Louis XIV totally in vain. The reopening of discussions on the subject of a French subsidy was planned in the summer. Throughout the autumn these deliberations with the French Ambassador, Barrillon, would continue.

There was another possibility – that expedient contemplated, if only for a moment, by Danby twelve months previously: the use of the King’s standing army to solder together the worn surface of his personal power. There were of course plenty of commentators who discerned this intention in the King’s slightest move. In particular, the raising of new royal guards in July (that measure condemned by the sensible Essex as being provocative) aroused the familiar suspicion that ‘governing by an army’ was on its way. The King however scoffed at the criticisms and raised his guards all the same. As far as he was concerned, all the reasons which had militated against a military solution in 1678 still obtained.

In June five Jesuit priests had been put to death. The King had no means of knowing that the impending Wakeman trial would represent the turning of the tide where reason and justice were concerned in London. The Scottish situation was hardly encouraging, and Monmouth’s success brought its own problems where Exclusion was concerned. The so-called Triumvirate of chief ministers in the King’s Council – Essex, Halifax and Sunderland – were now convinced that a proper dissolution of Parliament was essential. They feared that otherwise, when Parliament returned, Shaftesbury would introduce a newly triumphant Monmouth as his Exclusion candidate. It has been established that the Triumvirate were mistaken, and that Shaftesbury had no intention of supporting Monmouth at this juncture: but this is hindsight.⁵ On 3 July the King raised the question of dissolution in his Council, and after discussion it appeared that the majority were against it.

A week passed. Then, on 10 July, the King dissolved Parliament all the same. The thoughts of Charles II at this critical period can only be divined. He was careful to avoid committing them to paper. The written word had proved a dangerous medium where Danby was concerned and he had never much favoured it in the first place, either out of laziness or some profound need for self-concealment. The move to dissolution was the effective termination of his experiment with a new type of Council: he had ignored its decision. But then the Council’s decision would have interfered with his royal prerogative to prorogue or dissolve Parliament at will. Charles had not anticipated this particular confrontation when he set up the new Council. But where the prerogative was concerned, he knew where the royal interests lay.

A further week later, on 18 July, Wakeman, the Queen’s physician, was acquitted by a jury presided over by the Lord Chief Justice William Scroggs. At the time it was widely believed that Scroggs had been got at – bribed, for example, by the Portuguese Ambassador. Certainly he met a fair reward at the Court for presiding over such a welcome verdict: at Windsor thereafter it was noted that ‘the favourites of both sexes rejoiced’, and the soft white hands of the Duchess of Portsmouth were supposed to have patted the unwieldy form of the Lord Chief Justice in gratitude.⁶ But this was after the event. It has been pointed out by legal historians that Scroggs’ conduct of the case cannot be faulted by the conventions of his own age. He cast well-founded doubts on the testimony of Oates and Bedloe. Scroggs’ own language to the jury was also more impressive than the contemporary reaction might indicate. He told them, ‘Never care what the world says, follow your consciences.’ And of his own participation, Scroggs observed, ‘I would be loath to keep out popery by that way they would bring it in, that is, by blood and violence. I would fain have all things very fair.’⁷

There is in fact no evidence that Scroggs was influenced. Given that Wakeman was innocent, and given that his defence (unlike that of the Jesuits) was efficiently organized by some person of authority whose identity is unknown, Scroggs simply allowed justice to take its course.⁸ Afterwards a dead dog was thrown at his coach. The Popish issue was not yet equally dead – the trial of the Catholic lords was to come – but at least some progress had been made in killing it off.

The acquittal of Wakeman on the one hand, and the possibility of renewed Anglo-French manoeuvres on the other, meant that by August 1679 the King could at last hope for the ease which had been denied to him during the last horrendous twelve months. Virtually everything he held dear, both of a private and a public nature, had been under attack. But the essential sea wall had not yet been breached. It was at this point, by one of those strange flukes of personal misadventure from which the course of history is never wholly free, that the King fell violently ill.

This dramatic twist to events – occurring at a moment of maximum uncertainty concerning the succession – was all the more startling because it was so unexpected. The King was famous for his superb health. Like many men who consider physical exercise the best panacea, he had a cheerful disregard for the medical profession, ‘ever laughing at physicians’, and ‘would not come under their hands’.⁹ No one at Court was foolish enough to suppose that their King, who had survived so much, would actually elude the ordinary laws of mortality as well. Charles II was now in his fiftieth year. The constant fuss over the succession, the care taken to guard the King’s person against assassination: all this illustrates a general preoccupation with the future. But his imminent death had never been contemplated.

It is relevant to Shaftesbury’s tortuous policies over Exclusion, for example, that he was working towards a future he never expected to see. Nearly ten years older than the King, with a sickly and twisted body, Shaftesbury could not legitimately hope to outlive the vigorous, athletic monarch. The Duke of York himself was only three years younger than his brother and Charles was always reckoned to be the healthier of the two. James thought it worth recording in his memoirs that he too had not expected to outlive CharlesII.¹⁰

Now, from one moment to the next, all that was changed.

On 22 August at Windsor the King was struck down. He was seized with an acute fever, probably of the malarial origin which was so common in seventeenth-century Europe, since he was cured by ‘the Jesuit’s powder’, actually an early form of quinine imported from the South American barkcinchona. Appropriately enough, the King owed his cure to his own zest for scientific knowledge.¹¹ Although the bark had been known in England since the time of Cromwell, the dosage was not yet fully understood and the established doctors regarded the new cure with baffled suspicion. But Charles, being ‘the most inquisitive King in the whole world who is also the greatest patron of empirics’, had looked favourably upon one Robert Talbor, an early expert on the subject. He had joined with him in experiments using the new powder, and chided the physicians for their lack of interest. Even so, they might have denied the King his own cure in 1679 had they been able to think up anything else to administer. Evelyn tells the story of Dr Lower’s continued childish reluctance to admit its efficacy; eventually, faced with the King’s undoubted recovery, he fell back on the formula that it was ‘a Remedy fit only for Kings’! The King, more gratefully, knighted Talbor and granted him a pension.

Returning to the royal sick-room at Windsor, here no such happy outcome was predicted at the time of the King’s collapse. According to the prevalent insanitary custom (when infection was not understood), the poor King had his chamber crowded with his councillors – anxious as much for themselves and their future as for his. The councillors, standing on their own right to be present, warded off still greater crowds, but the spectacle of their grim and enquiring visages looming over him can only have added to the King’s fevered dreams. One unresolved question faced them. What was to be done about the Duke of York, lurking in unofficial exile at Brussels?

James’ legal position as heir presumptive was quite unaltered. Councillors could foresee an ugly situation arising if the King died, the Duke of York took over the throne which was his by right – and they had somehow neglected to acknowledge this fact. On the other hand, it was equally possible that the Duke of York, being absent, would fail to secure the throne: Monmouth, dominated by Shaftesbury and bolstered by his position as Captain General, might grab it; that spelt catastrophe for his former opponents. Presence often constituted right in a doubtful succession, as the weak Richard Cromwell gained over his stronger brother Henry, at the time of Oliver’s death, simply because Henry was absent in Ireland.

On 24 August Sunderland, faced with this dilemma, sent word to James that the King was ill. A day passed and it was suggested he should return. On 2 September James arrived back in England.

It was a decisive moment. Admittedly, by this date the King himself was recovering; he exchanged water-gruels and potions for the more robust fare of mutton and partridges. Soon he was demanding to go to Newmarket – no doubt to escape the claustrophobia of his closely watched sickroom. The doctors forbade it on the grounds that the season was too advanced and, as a result, ‘the Air too serene’ (meaning not so much calm as liable to a noxious twilight dew, from the Latin serus, ‘evening’). All the same, it was a decisive moment because James made it so. Such an ambiguous situation brought out the best in the military-trained Duke, accustomed to a lifetime of decision and command in the field and at sea. Suddenly his stalwart figure appeared as a bastion against contention and the worse evil of civil strife.

The Duke of York went back to the Continent three weeks later, but not before he had been assured that, had the King died, the Lord Mayor of London would have proclaimed James as his successor. The point was taken by courtiers and politicians alike that, were a similar crisis to arise, the Duke of York would be the gainer. The King’s health could never again be taken for granted: it was about this time that a ‘sleeping chair’ was ordered for the King’s progresses, symbolic of a general easing up in his restlessness.¹² In the following May he was ill again (with twice-daily bulletins on his progress). Thus the whole episode secured an ascendancy for the established candidate, in which the pretender Monmouth was the inevitable loser. Monmouth still had much to prove, and he did not help matters by his own behaviour.

It was in vain that Monmouth had attempted to prevent the return of the Duke of York. His own welcome from Scotland as the ‘clement victor’ was now eclipsed. Charles II preferred the interests of his brother – representing the ‘descent in the right line’– over those of his son (although Monmouth and his backers seemed unable to take in the point). It was Monmouth who was deprived of his general’s commission and, like the Duke of York, was asked by the King to absent himself from the felicity of the royal circle for a while.

The people had rejoiced to see Monmouth. Bonfires in abundance were lit in the streets on his behalf. But mob appeal, which Monmouth clearly possessed, was no substitute for his father’s imprimatur. There were those at Court who wondered whether the King’s attitude was ‘but a feint’; wiser heads decided that he was ‘in good earnest’.¹³ Monmouth, unconvinced, lingered for a while disconsolately. Then he headed for The Hague. There he managed to cause the King even more annoyance by striking up an unholy alliance with William of Orange: something which Charles, in a sharp autumnal mood, believed was directed against his own French interests.

The ascendancy of the Duke of York was not achieved without sacrifice. Charles was prepared to protect his brother’s right to the succession, but no more than that. In return for the dismissal of Monmouth as Captain General, James was obliged to agree to leave the centre of things himself. He was appointed as yet to no official position in Scotland; it was a year later that Lauderdale resigned ‘for your own solid and wise reasons’, as the King put it. Nevertheless on 27 October 1679 James and his family, whom he had collected from Brussels, set off north. It was significant of what had passed that it was something in the nature of a royal progress. Gentlemen took care to greet the heir presumptive to the throne on his way. It was an expression of that law described by Halifax: ‘Men’s thoughts are naturally apt to ramble beyond what is present; they love to work at a distance …’,¹⁴ and put even more poetically by the great Queen Elizabeth: ‘Men ever seek to worship the rising sun….’

At the centre of things, Charles II was left to cope with what was present. There was a trail of damage left by his illness and the behaviour of his brother and son. Meanwhile, the General Election of the summer had given him another House of Commons. The bitterness of the anti-Popish mood of the capital persisted. The popular celebrations in November reached a new pitch not only of hysterical malevolence, but also of organization. What was more, the date was shifted from 5 November – Guy Fawkes Day – to 17 November – the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth. The shift was deliberate. The famous Queen’s image was menacingly paraded, with its implied reproach to a lesser sovereign. As Marvell’s satiric ‘Dialogue between the Two Horses’ had it:

A Tudor! A Tudor! We’ve had Stuarts enough,

None ever reigned like old Bess in a ruff….

In the organization, the Green Ribbon Club took a hand. Buckingham also put his knowledge of the theatre to brilliant, if Luciferian, use. The result was a show at once spectacular and inflammatory. So dazzling was it to the eye that even the poor Catholics it was directed against could not resist watching it, as the Jews might have watched the great military rallies pass in Nazi Germany. So rousing was the show to the spirits of the rabble that many felt compelled to express the anti-Popish fire within by lighting real bonfires in the streets.

One of the newspapers supporting Oates, Domestick Intelligence, gave a gleeful report of it all. The centre-piece of the show was still the Pope himself. His figure cost £40 in wax alone: indeed, the total cost of the whole show, including claret for spectators, was nearly £2,500, a colossal sum for the times. Figures of devils attended the Pope – ‘Hail Holy Father’ – but more ominous to the Court were his other attendants: nuns – ‘the Pope’s Whores’ – labelled ‘Courtesans in Ordinary’. Another typical placard showed a Jesuit with a bloody sword and pistol and the legend: ‘Our Religion is Murder, Rapine and Rebellion.’ The spectre of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey demanded vengeance.¹⁵ Finally, as Dryden put it, ‘the mitred poppet [doll] from his chair they drew’, and the Pope was duly consigned to the fierce bonfire which, it was hoped, symbolized his ultimate destination.

In such an atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that when a new Plot was put forward for popular inspection by one Thomas Dangerfield, it was not found wanting. Dangerfield, a scurrilous rascal, belonged to the tradition of Oates and Bedloe as a witness; his novel invention consisted of uncovering a plot involving the Whig leaders, including Shaftesbury. When that failed, he turned the plot on its head and vowed that a Popish conspiracy, centring on the death of the King, lay at the heart of it after all. This new farrago was nicknamed the Meal Tub Plot, after the hiding-place where a Catholic midwife was supposed to have concealed incriminating papers. The King, commenting that ‘he loved to discover Plots, but not to create any’, made it clear that he regarded it all, Whig coup d’état and Popish assassination, midwife and meal tub, as dangerous nonsense.¹⁶ But there was no doubt that the absence of a clamorous House of Commons assisted him in maintaining this firm view. The whole parading mob, with their lighted torches, were not half as threatening to him as a few vocal Members of Parliament.

Under the circumstances, animated also by the renewal of the French negotiations, the King decided not to meet his new Parliament. At this point, Shaftesbury went too far for the second time. Just as he had infuriated the King in the autumn of 1673 by his open attack on the Duke of York, which then seemed lèse-majesté, he now called a meeting of the Privy Council to discuss James’ projected departure for Scotland. He suggested the matter should have been discussed in the Council first (he pretended to believe the journey was being made without the royal assent).

The King dismissed Shaftesbury instantly, and the next day drove the message home by telling the Council that he did not propose to allow Parliament to meet until the following January. The ‘Chits’ were appointed with Laurence Hyde replacing Essex as First Lord of the Treasury. On 10 December the King let it be known that he had thought better of that date too, and, still further buoyed up by the progress of matters with France, indicated that Parliament would not actually meet again until November 1680. By December 1679 the irrepressible Monmouth had still further blotted his copybook by returning from the Netherlands against the King’s specific orders. Monmouth’s – and his backers’ – reasoning was that the absence of the Duke of York in Scotland provided a heaven-sent opportunity. Monmouth could build up just that kind of solid support which he needed to press his own claims and, thinking ahead, secure the King’s acknowledgement of them. There were many fingers in this Protestant pie, some of them the pretty, meddling fingers of the royal mistresses. Nell Gwynn, for example, justified her popular reputation as a staunch protagonist of that religion by supporting Monmouth; later even Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, her Catholic counterpart, took part in an intrigue to get the King to name his own successor.

But it was unwise to count on the susceptibility of Charles II to petticoat government. The King was plainly furious with Monmouth; Nelly’s poignant descriptions of the wan looks of Charles’ once-beloved son, his Absalom, did nothing to allay his fury. They might cry ‘God bless Monmouth’ in the playhouses, but at Court the young Duke was ostentatiously stripped of his various civil and military positions. In February the Duke of York was permitted to return from Scotland. In the absence of a Parliamentary session, an angry war of pamphleteering concerning the claims of the rival dukes (and not ignoring those of the two Protestant princesses) broke out in the late summer.

In particular, the legend of the King’s marriage to Monmouth’s mother, watered by the hopes of the opposition, grew apace. The campaign of rumour had begun in the late summer. All sorts of stories were given credence, generally on the sanguine principle that two improbabilities added together make a possibility, and four improbabilities a certainty. It was pointed out gleefully that James had once tried to deny his marriage to Anne Hyde; another comparison was made to Edward IV’s refutation of Lady Eleanor Talbot in order to marry Elizabeth Woodville. The fact that James had been contracted to Anne Hyde, and the supposition that Edward IV had been contracted to Eleanor Talbot, were given as proofs that Charles’ refutation of Lucy Walter was also false: it was smear by analogy.¹⁷ Even details of the supposed marriage were now given: solemnized by the late Bishop of Lincoln (who was of course dead) in the house of an innkeeper at Liège, and witnessed by certain lords. The marriage certificate was said to be preserved in an exciting ‘Black Box’, one of those objects of which it could be said that everyone knew of someone else who had definitely seen it.¹⁸

The trouble was that a putative marriage was by far the most convenient way of establishing Monmouth’s claim: it hurt no one (except the Papist Duke of York, and who cared about that?) and provided a neat solution to the problem of the succession – so at least ran the argument of Monmouth’s sponsors. Thus the rumours nagged and badgered the King and would not go away.

The total lack of substance in these rumours need not be reiterated. By the spring of 1680 Charles was beginning to feel rather the same way. For a long time his instinct had been to ignore the matter as being too ridiculous to dignify with official discussion. Early in 1679 however he had made, with some reluctance, a declaration to four of his councillors, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two months later he repeated this declaration to the Council as a whole, and also committed it to paper, ‘it being all written and signed in his Majestie’s own hand’. This he judged to be the best way to kill this particular snake.

The document, dated partially according to the old style by which the year began on 25 March, is worth quoting in full:

For the voiding of any dispute which may happen in time to come concerning the succession to the Crown, I do here declare in the presence of Almighty God, that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catharine [‘Queene Catarine’ in the original] now living. Whitehall the 3rd day of March 1678/9. Charles R.

The impatience can be seen in the handwriting, the words ‘Almighty God’ being the only ones written with any care at all. This document was ordered to be kept in the Council Chest.^fn119

But the snake was scotched, not killed.

In the summer of 1680, driven beyond endurance on the subject, the King decided to put an end to these rumours once and for all. The London Gazette of 8 June, the official government organ, gave a prolonged recitation of the steps leading up to this decision, with the preamble: ‘We cannot but take notice of the great Industry and Malice wherewith some men of a Seditious and Restless Spirit, do spread abroad a most false and scandalous Report of a Marriage or Contract of Marriage….’

In particular, care was taken to nail the story that there was ‘a Writing yet Extant’ – that is, a marriage certificate; it was pointed out that the very lords said to have been present at the marriage had been examined and had denied the allegation. Then the London Gazette printed the King’s own declaration to his Council in full.

‘Though I am confident that this Idle Story cannot have any effect in this Age …’, wrote the King. But the idle story persisted simply because it suited men’s purposes at the time. It would haunt the first year of James II’s reign for the same reason, and bring the wretched Monmouth to his death.

In general, the spring of 1680 was a period redolent of anger and disgust on all sides. Halifax wrote frankly in January that it would be pleasanter in a wasps’ nest than in London at the present time.²⁰ In January also seven Catholic priests were tried merely on grounds of their ministry (although it was stated that they were not on trial for their lives, unlike those priests already executed in the provinces). Lack of cash meant that even members of the royal household were clamouring for their salaries. The King, encouraged by Sunderland, took refuge in the hope that foreign policy would once more rescue him from his bonds.

Sunderland’s strategy was based on the notion of a series of treaties bringing in Spain, the Austrian Empire and even the United Provinces.²¹ It was of course the reloading of the see-saw. France was not likely to view this new weighting with approval. Charles IIacknowledged the change by making no official gesture at the time of the wedding of Louis XIV’s son. The secret talks with Barrillon were however not excluded, as they had not been excluded during the sway of the pro-Dutch Danby. Sunderland, like Danby, simply occupied one end of the see-saw. The Austrian Emperor, however, a vital character in the proposed new alliance, declined to commit himself. In common with the rest of Europe’s happily absolute monarchs, he was anxious to see how the King of England would deal with this obstreperous Parliament of his. Thus the foreign policy of Charles II, which he trusted to free him from Parliament by the manipulation of foreign powers, remained uncomfortably dependent upon it.

Many in England at the time believed that the Crown itself was threatened. James Duke of York had written to William of Orange the previous year that ‘the monarchy itself is in great danger as well as his Majesty’s person …’. To a certain extent the King himself shared this view. There had been a rumour at the time of his illness in August that a Commonwealth would be set up if he died. At all events, he was quite prepared to take a series of steps to ensure that the country did not become further inflamed. Essentially he saw himself as forced to take these steps. They were produced out of a situation which was not of his own making, a situation which might otherwise lead to revolution. That was the King’s angle. Seen from another angle these steps represented quite simply the beginnings of tighter, even absolutist, control. In May, for example, the judges (now far more the King’s men than before, thanks to the new policy towards judicial appointments) gave a unanimous opinion to the Council that the King might prohibit all unlicensed news-books and pamphlets in the interests of good order. The King had another asset in the crucial royal warrant by which municipal corporations were granted their charters. It was in essence a question of control over the composition of the House of Commons. Four-fifths of the MPs at that time were city or borough members, and, by packing the governing body of a corporation in charge of their election – or in fact selection – attractive results could in theory be gained. The technique was to recall the charter of a given corporation on the excuse of a misdemeanour, using a Quo Warranto, if it was not surrendered voluntarily. This was not a new issue, nor were the steps which the King now began to take new:²² it was the confidence he showed in his attack which was new.

Back in the 1630s his father had struggled with the City of London over its charter; Cromwell, following the Stuart trend in power, had fought with the City of Colchester. It has been pointed out that there is evidence of Crown efforts in the 1660s to impose some kind of control by using the uncertain position, after the Restoration, of many corporations whose charters had been granted by Cromwell. These early manoeuvres, in which the Duke of York seems to have played a part, came to an end not so much out of fear of the corporations, as out of fear of the House of Commons defending their own privileges in this respect.

By 1680 there was no question of the King avoiding a clash with the House of Commons: as he saw it, the Whigs were snapping at his privileges. Moreover, his dissolutions of Parliament had been disastrous: he found himself with a more Whiggish body each time. By calling in the charters, he might provide a more satisfactory selection of Parliamentary candidates. Once again he saw himself combating a trend; others might view the situation differently.

It was true that the summer of 1680 also saw the beginnings of the inevitable blacklash which violent happenings – and the possibility of violent change – bring. This backlash worked naturally to the advantage of the monarchy. Francis North, in his judicial progresses at the time, witnessed ‘some dawnings of loyalty to the Crown’. The reprinting of the works of Sir Robert Filmer (begun in 1679) was another notable manifestation of Tory resurgence: he was the only theoretician in the 1630s who had actually supported Divine Right. The lapsing of the government order against unlicensed printings meant that the summer was loud with a cacophony of propaganda, Tory as well as Whig. Roger L’Estrange, an able and vituperative Tory journalist, conducted a pamphlet war against the Whigs in general and Titus Oates in particular.²³

In Scotland the latest anti-government revolt, in June, brought to prominence the Cameronians – named for one of their leaders, Richard Cameron. These rebels styled themselves as standing for the ‘anti-popish, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, anti-sectarian, true Presbyterian church of Scotland’ and, not surprisingly with such a sweeping ideal, forswore allegiance to the King of England. They also believed in preventive murder – in other words, terrorism. The Cameronians were however easily defeated and their leaders killed. Scotland under the Duke of York (who returned there in October) was to enjoy at least a stability of administration which was to his credit. Although his reputation was blackened later, the suppression of terrorism was at the time seen as essential, and James’ methods no more severe than those generally sanctioned at the time in Scotland. To many of the nobility and gentry, the presence of the King’s brother was welcome, while he himself became ‘highly esteemed’.²⁴

Meanwhile, back in England, there was a meeting of ministers in June, known as the Althorp conference, which included Halifax, as well as Sunderland, Hyde and Godolphin. It was agreed that these ministers should labour to produce a more amenable Parliament. The King promised in return not to ask Parliament for money unless his foreign alliances necessitated it; and he gave securities against Popery (but not against the succession of James). Halifax pronounced himself satisfied with such a position. The Althorp conference was an earnest of the kind of reasonable accommodation the King might be able to achieve in the future.

As a portent however it was far outclassed by certain outrageous public events which promised a very different outcome of the King’s struggles. Most notable of these was the attempt by Shaftesbury to indict the Duke of York as a Catholic recusant and Louise Duchess of Portsmouth as a common prostitute before a Whig Jury in Middlesex. The penalty for the latter crime was unthinkable for the royal mistress (Louise stood to be incarcerated in the stocks, amongst other painful humiliations). The penalty for the former was purely financial. Nevertheless the joint attack was a calculated piece of provocation on the part of the Exclusionists. In the event, Lord Chief Justice Scroggs had the jury discharged. And so the matter ended; although it had the effect of sending the terrified duchess scurrying over to the Exclusionists, hoping to save herself by abandoning the cause of James. The King’s mood became ever blacker and more withdrawn.

‘Our most solitary sovereign,’ Thomas Bruce called him. A rhyme by Lord Dorset, circulated that autumn, compared him to a King at chess, who has already lost his rooks and knights:

(His Queens and Bishops in distress)

Shifting about, growing less and less

With here and there a pawn.

One effect of this withdrawal was to make him increasingly inscrutable. As Barrillon wrote back to France, ‘His conduct is so secret and impenetrable, that even the most skilful observers are misled. The King has secret dealings and contacts with all the factions and those who are most opposed to his interests flatter themselves that they will win him over to their side.’²⁵ It had never been particularly easy to gauge the secret emotions of Charles II, since his youth had trained him to hold his feelings, like playing-cards, close to his chest. Charles had, on the other hand, prided himself on being able to gauge the emotions of others – which gave him a double advantage. Now, in the momentous autumn of 1680, this inscrutability was to be a prime factor in the ultimate fate of the Second Exclusion Bill.

For there is no doubt that a large proportion of those who voted in favour of it genuinely believed that the King was prepared to ditch his brother. As Halifax reported, by October 1680 half the world was absolutely confident that the King would quit the Duke of York and the other half absolutely confident that he would not.²⁶ Yet, as has been expressed, the King had in fact no intention of doing so: so that one-half of the world was (as often happens) confident but absolutely wrong. Baffled by the King’s prudent secretiveness, the Exclusionists allowed optimism about his intentions to sway their judgement. They expected support from him and none came.

Admittedly, the opponents of the Bill gained no great royal support either. The King had called Parliament for quite another purpose. Tangier, the Queen’s dowry, was in danger as an outpost, being beset by the Moors. Only vast injections of cash to raise more troops could be expected to save it from falling into their hands. The French discussions were still covertly proceeding, but, as Louis XIV appreciated, ‘He [Charles II] only treats with me to derive an advantage in his future negotiations with his subjects.’²⁷ Under these circumstances, King Louis was in no hurry to conclude yet another secret agreement which might bolster up King Charles, but leave England officially no better disposed towards France than she had been before.

Charles II therefore opened Parliament in October strongly on the theme of Tangier and its desperate plight. In the summer its defender, the Earl of Ossory, Ormonde’s son, had been killed. Charles had written a personal letter to his parents concerning the great loss, in which ‘I take myself to be an equal sharer with you both’.²⁸ Without new fortifications – which had to be paid for – Tangier was lost: ‘Therefore I lay the matter plainly before you, and desire your advice and assistance.’ Throwing in assurances about the maintenance of Protestantism at home the while, the King pleaded for money which would provide ‘greater strength and reputation both at home and abroad’. He would also bring King and Parliament together. For above all he desired ‘a perfect union among ourselves’.²⁹

The answer of the House of Commons to this powerful pleading was to introduce the Second Exclusion Bill. The so-called Tangier Parliament did not share the King’s concern at the fate of this outpost – quite ignoring its strategic position on the Mediterranean; later one member of Parliament would refer to the King’s preoccupation with Tangier as being like Nero’s decision ‘when Rome was on fire, to fiddle’. The first reading of that Bill which the Commons considered so much more important took place on 2 November; the Bill was carried.³⁰

On 6 November the House of Commons moved that Exclusion did not apply to the children of the Duke of York; their title would be unimpaired. But the next day the King sent a message to the Commons, offering once again to agree to any securities with regard to the maintenance of Protestantism, provided the ‘descent in the right line’ was not touched. The day after that the House of Commons, ignoring the King’s suggestion, moved that Mary, James’ elder daughter, should inherit the throne (as would have happened if her father had been dead).

At this point Sunderland moved over to the Exclusionist cause, to the indignation of the King. Sunderland’s point was that Exclusion represented the only viable alternative to a French involvement. He also dreaded dissolution and the prospect of yet another unsatisfactory Parliament. And he threw in for good measure that it safeguarded the King’s own life. But Charles, intent on his own steady course, referred to Sunderland’s behaviour, in an audible aside, as ‘the kiss of Judas’.³¹

The meetings of the Commons also took place against a dramatic background of movement on the part of the rival claimants. The Duke of York, who had returned from Scotland in February, was despatched thither again by the King in October. Monmouth, who had still not learnt his lesson about the limits of the King’s indulgence, set off on a series of progresses around the country which aroused a satisfying loyal chorus of support from those who witnessed them. It is possible that Monmouth was encouraged in this unlicensed display of strength by Shaftesbury. If so, Shaftesbury also had not yet understood the King’s capacity for sharp action when tried too far; the lesson would shortly be rammed home for him.

The Commons, having passed the Bill on the third reading, with the question of James’ descendants left open, passed it on to the Lords. And at this point the Lords, seeing an opportunity to avenge themselves for the various insults and insolences dealt them by the Commons during this period of warfare between the two chambers, joined battle.

In 1678, for example, the House of Lords’ right of originating Bills of Supply (that is, money bills) had been attacked by the Commons. The latter claimed that ‘all aids and supplies … are the sole gift of the Commons’. Later the Lords counter-attacked on this particular subject; but in the autumn of 1680 the defeat of the Exclusion Bill offered the possibility of revenge in a different area.

The King himself paid the debate in the House of Lords the closest attention; a practice he had begun in the days of the Roos Divorce Bill, another measure which had seemed likely to affect the fortunes of his family. On occasion he threw in a word himself, and was formally thanked by the House. The King’s posture in the House of Lords was characteristic: he began by sitting on the throne, then moved to the fire, where he felt more comfortable, and finally went round like ‘a common solicitor’, as Burnet vividly expressed it, lobbying on behalf of his own interests.³²

Many of the speeches – so far as can be judged from the existing texts since the debate has only come down to us in fragmentary note form – expressed a reassuring conservatism. The contribution of old Lord Ailesbury was one such example.³³ Ailesbury was certainly over-optimistic when he suggested that James might turn Protestant, as Henri IV had turned Catholic (how that celebrated conversion continued to haunt the descendants of Henri Quatre!). But when he spoke along these lines, ‘If the right heir should be thrown out may we not be subject to invasions abroad or Wars at Home. More insecurity from Wars than to suffer him to Reign’, he was striking exactly the note of alarm which had long sounded in the King’s ears. Lauderdale prayed that ‘We must not do Evil that good may come of it’ and reminded the House – another significant touch – that the Duke of York was ‘Son to Charles the First of Blessed Memory’ as well as ‘only brother to King Charles 2d’.

But the key speech came from Halifax. Only details of Halifax’s superb and successful effort remain:³⁴ but from these it is clear that he dwelt firmly on the possibilities of revolution – or at least an armed rising under James – which the passing of the Bill might offer. These references to the power of the Duke of York in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere ‘with the Fleet’, caused fury when they were reported to the Lower House. One MP exclaimed angrily that Halifax should be told, ‘If the Duke had such power, it was time to take it out of his hands.’ But Halifax remained steady. The Catholic succession, if it occurred, could be dealt with by other means, such as limitations. To throw out the Duke of York’s claim by means of a Bill was to provoke exactly the kind of trouble they all wished to avoid.

It is clear from the reports of contemporaries that Halifax’s decision to oppose Exclusion proved crucial. Only Halifax had the trenchant style necessary to cut down Shaftesbury, capable of demonic leadership in such a cause. There was one particularly telling exchange. Shaftesbury suggested sarcastically that Halifax could not really believe the Duke to be a Catholic, since he ‘combated with such warmth’ their own reasonable precautions against the Duke’s Catholicism. To this Halifax riposted that of course he knew the Duke to be a Catholic. Since he feared the consequences of the Duke’s Catholicism, he had opposed the Declaration of Indulgence (which Shaftesbury had supported) and worked for the Triple Alliance (which Shaftesbury had worked against). At this Shaftesbury was ‘much disconcerted’.

Dryden afterwards paid tribute to Halifax’s influence: his

piercing wit and pregnant thought

Endued by nature and by learning taught

To move assemblies …

So much the weight of one brave man can do.

During the ten-hour debate Shaftesbury never got up to speak without Halifax answering him. The final verdict was that Halifax’s rapier was ‘too hard’ for Shaftesbury.

At the end of the day the Second Exclusion Bill was defeated by sixty-three votes to thirty. And so the issue of the succession was, unexpectedly to many, disastrously to not a few, settled for the time being in favour of the Catholic Duke, who represented the old order as well as descent in the right line. As for Exclusion, another satiric couplet summed up its dismissal in lines not quite up to the level of Dryden, but pithy nonetheless:

Our Renowned Peerage will not have it so,

The Demi-Gods and Heroes thunder, No.³⁵

1 It is now in the Pierpont Morgan Collection, New York, having been purchased from an unknown source in the present century.