History of England 1-6

But this is the heart of the comedies of the Restoration period. They reflect a hard, if brittle, society where the prize goes to the most devious or hypocritical; they represent a world in which all moral values are provisional or uncertain; they convey a general sense of instability in which no one knows quite what to believe or how to behave. It is the perfect complement to Restoration tragedy in which fantastic notions of love or valour are pitched past the reality of life or true feeling; they are contrived and sentimental vehicles for rant and rhetoric.

The comedies, unlike the tragedies, of the period are at least set in real time and real place. The time is always the present moment, and the place is always London.

Sparkish: Come, but where do we dine?

Horner: Even where you will.

Sparkish: At Chateline’s?

Dorilant: Yes, if you will.

Sparkish: Or at the Cock?

Dorilant: Yes, if you please.

Sparkish: Or at the Dog and Partridge?

This was a world in which the participants must ‘stay, until the chairs come’, in which the prostitutes always wore vizards, and in which the women ‘all fell a-laughing, till they bepissed themselves’. The protagonists are always those of the gentry or nobility, or at least those who aspire to be such; the playwrights were of the same mould, as were the members of the audience. Everyone knew everyone else but, in this multiple game of mirrors, we may glimpse the shape of the age.

The characters of course express themselves in prose; good conversation was considered be the medium of truth as well as of manners. Nothing was so delightfully true as that which was perfectly expressed. The notion of ‘wit’ is crucial here since, as Horner expresses it, ‘methinks wit is more necessary than beauty, and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it’. Wit was not simply the effect of an epigram but, rather, the product of a fertile mind and keen observation. Wit was the currency of the court of Charles II.

The obscenity was also as much part of the court as of the stage. Horner apologizes to Lady Horner for bringing to her from France ‘not so much as a bawdy picture, new postures, nor the second part of the École des Filles’. Pepys described the latter publication as ‘the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw … so that I was shamed of reading it’. So the comic stage was used to strong meat. Yet not, perhaps, as strong as this:

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done ’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

The author, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, was an indispensable element of the court of Charles II. At the age of seventeen, on Christmas Day 1664, he arrived at Whitehall bearing a letter to the king from the duchess of Orléans in France. Soon enough he was enrolled in the circle of wits that surrounded the king and by the spring of 1666 he had been appointed as one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber. He had all the qualities that the king admired. He was witty and he was fluent; he had a lightness of manner, and indeed of conscience, that were of paramount importance in such surroundings:

That pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,

Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;

But by rubbing and scrubbing so large it does grow,

It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.

He was sent to the Tower after attempting to abduct a lady; on his release, at the king’s orders, he played a valiant or perhaps foolhardy role in one of the conflicts with the Dutch. His subsequent life at court principally consisted of liberal doses of drink and sex, interlarded with fashionable atheism or, as it was sometimes known, ‘Hobbeism’. He recalled that at an atheistical meeting at the house of a ‘man of quality’ ‘I undertook to manage the cause, and was the principal disputant against God and piety, and … received the applause of the whole company’. This conveys sufficiently the presiding atmosphere of Whitehall.

For five years he was, by his own account, continually drunk and was so little master of himself that he forgot many of his ‘wild and unaccountable’ actions. Like most of his contemporaries at court he was deeply engaged in the theatre of the time; in fact the drama can perhaps best be seen as an extension of the court itself. Rochester patronized playwrights such as Dryden and Otway; he wrote a comedy and a tragedy as well as various prologues. Yet he is still remembered principally for his satirical invectives and for his mastery of obscenity:

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse,

Of who fucks who, and who does worse …

A character in The Country Wife asks, ‘Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person.’ The ‘frankness’ might have consisted principally of blasphemy and obscenity, but it was also part of a novel dispensation represented by the cogent social analysis of Thomas Hobbes and the decision of the experimenters of the Royal Society to deal in things and not in words. It was an attempt to see the world anew, after the realization that religious obscurantism and doctrinaire prejudices had previously brought England into confusion. Horace Walpole wrote that ‘because the presbyterians and religionists had affected to call every thing by a scripture-name, the new court affected to call every thing by its own name’. It was time to clear away the rubble of untested assumptions, false rhetoric and standard appeals to authority or to tradition. This was the context for the ironical, cynical and materialist atmosphere of the Restoration court.

44

Noise rhymes to noise

When James arrived at his brother’s sickroom in Windsor Castle he fell to his knees, and it is reported that the two men burst into tears. The king had recovered some of his strength and was already out of danger. Yet the two claimants to the throne, the dukes of York and Monmouth, were now in confrontation; each had his own band of supporters, but James for the moment had the upper hand. His sudden return to England had not caused an insurrection, as some had feared, and he had indeed been received with deference; the lord mayor and the aldermen of London, for example, had come to kiss his hand. He did not wish to return to exile in Brussels, and seems to have made it clear that he would leave England only if the duke of Monmouth also made his exit. It was agreed therefore that Monmouth would retire into Holland, out of harm’s way, while James would be dispatched to Edinburgh as a kind of viceroy. He remained there for almost three years.

It had already become clear that, in the election of the summer, the Whigs had won the majority and that those who had voted against the ‘exclusion’ of James were generally turned out of office. Charles refused to allow this parliament to sit, however, and prorogued it to the beginning of the following year, 1680. He told his nephew, William of Orange, that he had no choice in the matter and that otherwise ‘they would have his crown’; he also feared that the Commons would proceed to the impeachment of his brother and his wife for their Catholic beliefs. Few expected parliament to meet again.

Shaftesbury was discharged from his office as lord president of the new council, and at once entered his true role as leader of the opposition to the court and Crown. Yet he knew well enough that he had no real power unless or until parliament was assembled. The Commons was his praetorian guard. Almost at once, therefore, he planned to launch petitions from all parts of the country for its return. His organization was such that his agents, together with notable local men, went from parish to parish collecting marks and signatures. No one, not even the poorest, was overlooked.

On 17 November the Green Ribbon Club, opposed to Catholics and to the court, organized a great pageant in London in which it was claimed that 200,000 people took part. A variety of Catholic personages were in representation dragged through the streets, and the procession eventually halted in Fleet Street just by the King’s Arms, the headquarters of the club; here effigies of the pope and of the devil, as well as sundry monks, nuns and Jesuits, were hurled into the flames of a fire accompanied by a great shout that, according to a pamphlet, ‘London’s Defiance to Rome’, reached France and Rome ‘damping them all with a dreadful astonishment’. Macaulay remarks in his History of England that two words became current at this time, ‘mob’ and ‘sham’.

When the duke of Monmouth arrived in London unexpectedly from exile, he was greeted with bonfires and jubilant crowds as the natural Protestant successor to the throne; he was not so warmly received by his father, however, who told him to be gone from court. His son disobeyed on the grounds that he must stay in order to preserve the life of his father from the designs of the papists.

At the beginning of December 1679, with a party of fifteen other peers, Shaftesbury stopped Charles on his way to the royal chapel and presented him with a petition for the sitting of parliament. The king was so irate that he prorogued the assembly for a further eleven months and issued a proclamation against petitioning itself. His supporters were said to ‘abhor’ the conduct of those who were trying to force the king’s hand; for a while grew up the factions of ‘the Abhorrers’ and ‘the Petitioners’.

After some months of impasse Shaftesbury once more raised the temperature when in the early summer of 1680 he tried to present, to a Middlesex grand jury, the duke of York as a papist and the duchess of Portsmouth, Charles’s mistress, as a prostitute. The latter had already attracted the dislike and suspicion of many, and it had often been suggested that she should be sent packing to France as soon as possible. Shaftesbury’s action was of course an open affront to the king, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion. The king hastened to London from Windsor where he instructed the chief justice, William Scroggs, to dismiss the grand jury before it heard any evidence for the charges. The damage had been done, however, compounded by the fact that Shaftesbury received no rebuke.

When parliament finally met, towards the end of October, the Commons was full from the very first session. The king’s ministers, known as ‘the chits’ because of their relative youth, had formulated what they hoped was a consistent policy; they intended to defuse the threat of exclusion by imposing limitations on the power of a future King James, and to seek an alliance with the United Provinces against the French. It was still important to signal hostility to Louis XIV, even though Charles had been engaged in constant negotiations to obtain money from him.

The Whigs were not to be averted from their purpose, however, and at the beginning of November a second Exclusion Bill against the duke of York was introduced. It received its third reading within nine days and was then sent up to the Lords. The duke of Monmouth came back to London from a triumphal tour of the West Country in order to participate in the discussions.

The king also attended this long session of the peers, from eleven in the morning to nine at night, and listened to them with eager attention. It had been believed that he would abandon his brother, however reluctantly, for the sake of public peace; he was known to fear, more than anything else, the outbreak of another civil war. But in fact he remained firm and made his feelings known during the course of the Lords’ debate. When Monmouth expressed his concern for his father, Charles called out, ‘It is a Judas kiss that he gives me!’ The sentiments of the king may have helped to concentrate the minds of the Lords. They voted, sixty-three to thirty, against the Exclusion Bill. Shaftesbury’s measure had failed.

It was hoped that the Commons might now suggest a compromise upon which both sides might agree, but no possibility of a middle way existed. The Commons passed a series of resolutions aimed at the exclusion of the duke of York; they stated that no supply of money could be voted under the circumstances, that the councillors of the king should be removed from public employment, and that any man who lent money to the king should be called to the bar of parliament. The king was advised to prorogue parliament once again and the Commons, speedily warned of this threat, met early on the morning of 10 January 1681, to vote that anyone who offered such advice was a traitor to the king and to the realm. The king therefore issued a proclamation dissolving parliament, and ordering that a new assembly should meet in Oxford within two months.

This aroused anger, resentment and no little anxiety among Shaftesbury and his followers. Oxford was known to be the most royalist of all English cities. They would have been even more concerned if they had learned that Louis XIV had proffered another bribe to the king. Louis offered to grant him an annual pension, larger than anything parliament would provide, as long as he refrained from joining in any attack upon France by Spain or others. A ban on French imports was also allowed to expire. Nothing was put in writing, and no signatures were required; it was simply a verbal agreement, mediated by envoys, between the two kings.

The new parliament, meeting on 21 March 1681, was no more willing than its predecessor to come to any agreement. Charles appeared before the two houses with a compromise. If James ever became king, his powers would be transferred to a regent. In the first instance that regent would be James’s older daughter, Mary, princess of Orange, a Protestant; and, in the event of her decease, the regency would devolve upon his other Protestant daughter, Anne. This seemed on the face of it an eminently sensible arrangement, but the Commons refused to accept it. Instead it debated a third Exclusion Bill. Charles in fact seems genuinely to have wished for an agreement in the calmer atmosphere of Oxford, no less for the fact that he feared another civil war. That was another reason for his secret alliance with the French king; he might need men as well as money.

On 28 March, Charles, with his full regalia concealed in a covered sedan chair, proceeded to the Lords, who were sitting in the Geometry School of Oxford. He was about to spring a surprise. He appeared before the Lords in his ordinary clothes, but then he ordered his attendants to dress him in robe and crown. Thus attired he summoned the Commons. ‘My lords and gentlemen,’ he said to the two houses, ‘all the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end, when the divisions at the beginning are such: therefore, my lord chancellor, do as I have commanded you.’ He now told his opponents, to their faces, that they had been dissolved and must disperse. He left Oxford immediately, and they had no choice but to follow. It was reported that ‘the king’s breath scattered them like leaves in autumn’.

Charles now believed that he could survive without any parliamentary funds. His pension from France, and the raising of customs revenue from luxury French imports now freely admitted, would grant him room to manoeuvre; his household expenditure had in any case been considerably reduced. He had decided to embark upon a period of personal rule without an opposition to divert or trouble him. In this respect the king was greatly assisted by what seemed to be a resurgence of loyalty towards the Stuart monarchy. The intransigence of Shaftesbury and his followers, in rejecting what seemed to be a just and sensible offer on the matter of the regency, could be contrasted with the moderation of the king. They had wanted to bully him into submission, but he had remained firm. He had resisted any attempt to alter the natural succession because it was repugnant to his conscience and to the laws of England. That is how the abortive Oxford parliament could be represented.

In his declaration ‘to all his loving subjects, touching the causes and reasons that moved him to dissolve the last two parliaments’ he stated that ‘we assure ourself that we shall be assisted by the loyalty’ of those ‘who consider the rise and progress of the late troubles’. The ‘late troubles’ were the divisions that had led to the civil wars. ‘And we cannot but remember that religion, liberty and property were all lost and gone when monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that was restored.’ He appealed, therefore, to the instincts of loyalty and stability that maintained the traditions of the nation.

He now turned his fury upon Shaftesbury and his allies who, with no likelihood of a parliament, began to lose strength as well as purpose. Charles was determined to exclude them from all public offices; he decided to remove them from the judicial bench and from the administration of the towns. Sixty members of parliament who had voted for exclusion were removed from nomination as justices of the peace. Some of the lords-lieutenant of the counties were dismissed, together with the lowlier recorders and town clerks. Since the nonconformists had played a large role in the opposition, the laws against dissenters were executed with more rigour; they, rather than Roman Catholics, were increasingly consigned to prison. One contemporary said that it was a form of civil war, with the law replacing the sword.

At the beginning of July 1681 Shaftesbury was taken into custody and brought before the king and council where he was accused of treason; the earl denied the charge but was in any case committed to the Tower. Yet there was a flaw in the royal project. Shaftesbury had a residence at Aldersgate, and so his case came within the jurisdiction of the City. London was still in the hands of those who opposed the court; it was still, for the king, enemy territory.

When the earl’s case was heard in the Old Bailey, therefore, the grand jury was packed with prominent Whigs; the foreman had in fact been an exclusionist member of parliament. It was perhaps inevitable that a verdict of ignoramus – ‘we do not know’ – was given and Shaftesbury acquitted. Four days later he applied for bail and the king’s son, the duke of Monmouth, offered to act as his surety. He was released and, that night, the streets rang out with the cries ‘A Monmouth! A Shaftesbury!’ In many places, however, a Whig demonstration was countermanded by a Tory manifestation; or, as Sir Roger L’Estrange put it in his Observator, ‘Noise rhymes to Noise, and Noise must be opposed to Noise’.

Two days after the verdict had been given the king launched an investigation into London’s charter, asking ‘quo warranto’ or by what warrant did the City enjoy the corporate privileges that it claimed; it was a protracted and expensive procedure, replete with formal and legal niceties, which could easily be turned against the City corporation. Any pretext could be found or concocted by the court lawyers to justify a forfeiture. It was easier and less expensive to ask for a new charter, but this in turn might give the king power to remove ‘disaffected’ members of the corporation. It was a device that Charles had already been using to great effect.

Even before the quo warranto proceedings had ended, the court party was exercising all its influence to elect Tory sheriffs and a Tory mayor. Various subterfuges were employed. The keepers of the alehouses and coffee-houses were told that their licences would be revoked if they did not vote for the Tory candidates; most of the Whig candidates were removed from the poll on the grounds that they were Quakers, or were non-residents, or had refused to take the oaths, or were in some other way ineligible. The campaign of trickery and intimidation was successful, and the Tory candidates were elected. On the following day Shaftesbury left his house in Aldersgate and went into hiding before taking ship to Holland. He knew now that, in any new trial for high treason, his opponents would be able to control the juries. The king would finally claim his head. He died in Amsterdam at the beginning of the next year. It was his belief that the souls of men and women entered the stars at the moment of death; the spirit of Shaftesbury would kindle, perhaps, a very fiery comet.

Some London radicals were now convinced that Charles intended to create an absolute monarchy, and began to plot among themselves to resist any such attempt. It was reported by government informers that preparations had been made for an uprising by city dissenters, who were apparently resolved to capture the king and force him to act against his brother. In November 1682, hundreds of ‘brisk boys’ in the East End rioted with the call ‘A Monmouth! A Monmouth!’ Before he left for the continent Shaftesbury had joined with the duke in discussing an armed uprising in the event of the king’s death.

All this plotting and planning concluded in what became known as the ‘Rye House Plot’. Certain discontented Whigs – among them William, Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney and the earl of Essex – seem to have laid plans to ambush and kill the king and his brother on their way back from the races at Newmarket. The assassins would assemble at a lonely farmstead known as Rye House in Hertfordshire, for the purpose of ‘lopping the two sparks’. The plot was betrayed by one of the minor conspirators, and in the early summer of 1683 the principal agents were arrested. Even as the trial of Russell proceeded, the news came that Essex had been found dead in the Tower with wounds about his throat. It was supposed that he had committed suicide, thus presuming guilt, but it is possible that he had been murdered to prove the reality of the plot against the royal brothers. It would provide a convenient opportunity for the king to destroy all of the prominent Whigs.

When Lord Russell’s family pleaded for him the king replied that ‘if I do not take his life he will soon have mine’. His beheading, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was badly managed by the public hangman, Jack Ketch, who later issued an apology. When Algernon Sidney was also sentenced to death by the axe, he made a passionate statement of his innocence. The chief justice, Judge Jeffreys, rose and rebuked him. ‘I pray God work in you a temper fit to go into the other world, for I see you are not fit for this.’

‘My lord, feel my pulse and see if I am disordered. I bless God, I never was in better temper than I am now.’

Russell, Essex and Sidney became known as the first Whig martyrs.

The duke of Monmouth had also been implicated in the plot, and an indictment been drawn up against him. Yet he submitted to his father and signed a confession that ‘he owned the late conspiracy’ but was innocent of any design against the life of his father. On the following day he withdrew the statement, for fear that he had betrayed his erstwhile associates; whereupon he was banished from the court. John Evelyn reported in his diary, the entry of 15 July 1683, that ‘the public was now in great consternation on the late plot and conspiracy; his Majesty very melancholy, and not stirring without double guards; all the avenues and private doors about Whitehall and the Park shut up, few admitted to walk in it’.

The news of the conspiracy helped to rouse further anger against Whigs and dissenters, and the king published a declaration against ‘the factious party’ that was read out from every pulpit. This provoked the publication of innumerable ‘loyal addresses’ that underlined the supremacy of the king. Charles had in effect won his battle against parliament. He was also about to conquer London. The quo warranto proceedings had come to a conclusion, and in the summer of 1683 the king’s bench decided that the liberties of the city had been rendered forfeit and returned into the hands of the king.

Charles could now govern in any manner that he pleased. The earl of Danby, once pursued by the Commons, was promptly released from the Tower. The duke of York was granted extensive powers, and it seemed to many that he was already ruling in place of the king who more and more consulted only his pleasures. In the spring of 1684, in fact, the duke was reappointed to the privy council after an absence of eleven years. In this period Titus Oates, the instigator of the ‘Popish Plot’, was arrested for calling James a traitor; he was convicted and fined £100,000. This ensured that he remained in confinement for the foreseeable future.

An entry from Evelyn’s diaries conveys the mood and atmosphere of the triumphant court with its ‘inexpressable luxury, and prophanesse, gaming and all dissolution, and as if it were total forgetfulness of God’. The king was ‘sitting and toying with his concubines’, among them the duchess of Portsmouth, with a ‘French boy singing love-songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least two thousand in gold before them’.

Yet the games of Charles II were about to end. In the early weeks of 1685 he suffered from prolonged attacks of gout which left him debilitated. On the morning of Monday 2 February, he arose early after a restless and fevered night; to his attendants he seemed lethargic and almost torpid. He was also confused in speech and action. Then he fell into convulsions, or as one of his doctors put it ‘convulsivi motus’, that left him speechless for two hours; cantharides, or Spanish fly, was applied to his skin to promote blisters. The letting of his blood lent him some relief, and the king recovered his power of speech. The duke of York had been summoned, and arrived so rapidly that he was wearing one shoe and one slipper. The doctors now prepared powders to promote sneezing so that the pressure of ‘the humours’ upon the king’s brain might be relieved; he was also given a solution of cowslip flowers and spirit of sal ammoniac.

The king gradually seemed to grow better but by Wednesday afternoon he was covered in a profuse cold sweat that was a stage in the progress of dissolution. A preparation known as ‘spirit of human skull’ was then applied. By noon on Thursday there was little hope; he suffered several fits but was conscious in the intervals between them.

On that Thursday evening he ended the vacillations of a lifetime and formally entered the Roman Catholic communion by the ministrations of a Benedictine monk, John Hudleston. When the bishops and other attendants had withdrawn, the monk was conducted to the death chamber by the duke of York through a secret door. There seems little reason to doubt this account. James wrote, and spoke, of it. Hudleston himself left a brief description of the event. The observers had indeed been excluded from the chamber for a period, and afterwards the king refused to receive Anglican communion.

After that rite his mind was clear and his speech composed. On the following morning he asked to be taken to a window where he might see the rising sun. By ten o’clock he was unconscious. He died, quietly and without pain, shortly before noon.

45

The Protestant wind

So on 6 February 1685, the new king, James II, ascended the throne in the face of sustained and organized opposition from Shaftesbury and the Whigs. He was fifty-two years of age, and in vigorous heath. He had already proved himself to be determined and decisive; he had remained faithful to his Catholic beliefs despite every attempt to persuade him otherwise. He was more resolute and more trustworthy than his brother, but he lacked Charles’s geniality and perceptiveness. He seemed to have no great capacity for compromise and viewed the world about him in the simple terms of light and darkness; there was the monarchy and authority on one side, with republicanism and disorder on the other. His manner was stiff and restrained, his temper short.

The prospect of such a monarch, however, was not necessarily disagreeable. He was known to be more diligent and more scrupulous than his late brother, with a greater concern for economy in financial matters. He was the very model of a retired naval officer of moderate abilities. The court itself acquired quite a different tone. Where before there had been music and mirth and gambling there was now, according to Sir John Lauder, ‘little to be but seriousness and business’.

James’s first statement maintained his support for the Church of England as the truest friend to the monarchy. Yet a little more than a week after the old king’s death, according to John Evelyn, James ‘to the great grief of his subjects, did now, for the first time, go to mass publicly in the little Oratory at the duke’s lodgings, the doors being wide set open’. When the host was elevated, the Catholics fell upon their knees while the Protestants hurried out of the chapel. The new king was proclaiming his faith to the nation. He built his church upon the rock of Peter, but on that rock he would eventually founder.

Louis XIV had already sent a large sum of money to James as a reserve fund, held by the French ambassador, in case any insurrection or opposition should rise against him; Louis knew well enough that the English king would now favour Catholicism as far as lay in his power. James’s councillors were also aware, however, that parliament would have to pass any order for new taxation. James called in the French ambassador to explain the position. ‘Assure your master’, he told him according to the ambassador’s own account, ‘of my gratitude and attachment. I know that without his protection I can do nothing … I will take good care not to let the Houses meddle with foreign affairs. If I see in them any disposition to make mischief, I will send them about their business.’

He need not have concerned himself. Parliament met in the spring of 1685 and was overwhelmingly Tory or royalist in composition; in his speech he gave ‘assurance, concerning the care I will have of your religion and property’ and in return requested revenues for life. The members proceeded to vote him the funds; given the extraordinary increase in his excise revenue as a result of growing trade, they furnished him with more money than he actually required. They may have been given pause, however, by the king’s reference to ‘your religion’.

The only possible threat came from his late brother’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, who still harboured ambitions for the throne. Sure enough the duke left his exile in Amsterdam and, on 11 June, appeared with a small force off the coast at Lyme; he had believed that after his landing a multitude of supporters would flock to his flag, and so arrived with no more than 150 followers. Monmouth planted his blue standard on the soil of England and pronounced James to be a usurper; he also declared that the traitorous king had poisoned his brother, set light to London in the Great Fire, and encouraged the ‘Popish Plot’ as part of ‘one continued conspiracy against the reformed religion and the rights of the nation’. He then took upon himself the title of King James II.

Some of the natives of Dorset and Somerset joined his small army as he marched towards Taunton and Bridgwater, but there were far fewer recruits than he had originally expected. He had no coherent strategy of campaign, and he was quickly overwhelmed by James’s better-trained and better-armed soldiers. The battle of Sedgemoor was the last one to be fought upon English soil. Monmouth escaped from the field and was found lying under a bush, half-asleep from exhaustion, and covered with fern and nettles for camouflage.

No mercy was shown to the defeated. Monmouth himself was taken before the king; he knelt down and pleaded for his life. ‘Is there no hope?’ he finally asked. The king turned away in silence. The duke was beheaded upon Tower Hill, and became the victim of another botched execution by Jack Ketch.

The consequences for the people of the West Country were severe. Judge Jeffreys was sent among them to deal out punishment. The ‘Bloody Assizes’ became part of the folklore of the region. Many died in prison, 800 were transported to be slaves, while some 250 were sentenced to death. Twenty-nine were sentenced to die at Dorchester but the two executioners protested that they could not hang, draw and quarter so many men on a single day. A woman was beheaded for offering food and water to an escaping ‘rebel’. ‘Gentlemen,’ Jeffreys said to the jury, ‘in your place I would find her guilty, were she my own mother.’ Jeffreys laughed aloud, joked and exulted at the plight of the prisoners who came before him. He used to say that he gave the defendants ‘a lick with the rough side of my tongue’. ‘I see thee, villain, I see thee with the halter already around thy neck.’ When he was told that one prisoner relied upon parish alms he replied, ‘I will ease the parish of the burden.’

The defeat of the rebellion confirmed the king’s authority; he had triumphed over his enemies, and now set about the process of building a new state based upon his absolute power. He determined to abolish the Test Act, thereby allowing Catholics to assume control of various offices; he wished to repeal the Habeas Corpus Act, thereby granting him more control over his opponents, and to maintain his standing army of approximately 20,000 men. He needed an army to safeguard himself from any ‘disturbances’, without or within.

In the summer of the year, after the defeat of Monmouth, some 15,000 men were encamped on Hounslow Heath; a lawyer of the time, Sir John Lowther, recollected that the standing army came ‘to the astonishment of the people of England’ who had never heard of such a force in times of peace. The troops were soon billeted throughout the country where, under the guise of pursuing ‘rebels’, they might act as James’s security force. Some of their time was spent in disrupting the gatherings of Baptists and Presbyterians who, in this period, were once again some of the most persecuted of the dissenting sects. With the close assistance of Samuel Pepys, also, the king was intent upon establishing a formidable navy; this was part of his determination to consolidate and exploit the colonial territories within India, North America and the West Indies. He can be considered, therefore, as one of the founders of the commercial and imperial state that emerged in the eighteenth century.

The twin bonds of royal autocracy and the Catholic religion ensured the amity of James II and Louis XIV, and there was naturally much alarm in England when, in the autumn of 1685, the French king cancelled the Edict of Nantes that guaranteed freedom of worship to his Protestant subjects. Could James follow the same path? It was of course unlikely that James would dare to take measures against the English national Church but he might attempt to check its powers. His attitude towards the Protestant Huguenots who fled to England was not encouraging; he believed them to be anti-monarchical and was not anxious that they remain in his kingdom. They stayed, however, settling in Spitalfields and elsewhere, and were essentially to create the silk industry of the country.

When parliament reassembled on the appointed day, 9 November, much apprehension was naturally felt by the king’s supporters, the Tories, who also upheld the Anglican faith. ‘Never was there a more devoted Parliament,’ one contemporary observed, ‘but you know the point of religion is a tender point.’ The members of both houses were most alarmed by the fact that, in defiance of the Test Act, the king had already appointed Roman Catholic officers to the army and navy. The king declared, in his speech from the throne, that ‘having had the benefit of their services in such a time of need and danger [Monmouth’s invasion], I will neither expose them to disgrace, nor myself to the want of them, if there should be a second rebellion to make them necessary to me’. It was soon made clear to him that the members of both houses, but particularly those of the Lords, were dismayed by his illegal and unparliamentary appointments. One brave peer, Viscount Mordaunt, stated that ‘the evil which we are considering is neither future nor uncertain. A standing army exists. It is officered by papists. We have no foreign enemy. There is no rebellion in the land. For what, then, is this force maintained, except for the purpose of subverting our laws, and establishing that arbitrary power which is so justly abhorred by Englishmen?’

Eleven days after parliament had been summoned, James prorogued it until the following year; it was characteristic of his rule that he suppressed the assembly before it had the chance formally to challenge his authority. It was the first sign of the growing tension between the king and the political nation. Parliament never met again in the course of his short reign.

On the strength of his prerogative alone he now began to assist his co-religionists. He issued orders forbidding the celebration of ‘gunpowder treason day’, in which it was customary to burn an effigy of the pope; the edict was only partly successful. Various of the religious orders were once again settled in London; the Benedictines were ensconced at St James’s, the Carmelite friars in the City, the Franciscans in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Jesuits in the Savoy. A Catholic school was established by the Jesuits in that neighbourhood. One of James’s most intimate advisers was a Jesuit priest, Edward Petre, who was placed in charge of the royal chapel and who lodged in the king’s old apartments in Whitehall. By the end of the year five Roman Catholics were part of the privy council.

The king’s morals, however, were not governed by strictly Catholic standards. His principal mistress, Catherine Sedley, was given a large mansion in St James’s Square and soon acquired the title of countess of Dorchester. She seemed not to know the reason for his affection. ‘It cannot be my beauty,’ she said, ‘for he must see that I have none; and it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.’

The king often said that his purpose was to ‘establish’ or ‘re-establish’ Roman Catholicism. He may have realized that he would not be able to impose his faith upon the nation and he knew well enough that his likely successor, Mary, was a fervent Protestant; he hoped only to put Catholicism on terms of equality with Anglicanism in the belief that the virtues of his religion would in time elicit many converts. He had hoped to persuade his Anglican and Tory supporters to accede to his wishes but instead he only managed further to antagonize them. When a Catholic chapel was established in Lime Street, a crowd of Londoners gathered to attack ‘the mass house’; the trained bands were called out to disperse the crowd but demurred on the grounds that ‘we cannot in conscience fight for popery’. The king’s own stubborn and imperious temper did not help his cause. ‘I will make no concession’, he was accustomed to say. ‘My father made concessions, and he was beheaded.’

His purpose was to purge the judicial bench of all those who might be disaffected from his policies or his powers. It has been estimated that in the course of his reign he replaced up to nine-tenths of the serving justices of the peace in each county; the replacements were Roman Catholics who, in the absence of a police force, became the principal agents of law and royal authority. The corporations of the towns and the lords-lieutenant of the counties were also purged. When the king subsequently relieved the archbishop of Canterbury of his duties at the privy council, the French ambassador observed that James had resolved to favour only those who supported his interests.

The case of Gooden v. Hales was brought forward, in the summer of 1686, as a test of power. At issue was the right of the king to dispense with the penalties of the law and to suspend their execution, with particular reference to the Test Act against Catholics. When four judges declared that any such decision would ‘overturn the English constitution’, he simply dismissed them from the bench. Even those once most loyal to the king were now dismayed. ‘Everyone was astonished’, John Evelyn wrote in his diary entry for 27 June. ‘Great jealousies as to what would be the end of these proceedings.’

In this summer, too, the king established a commission for ecclesiastical causes for ‘the prevention of indiscreet preaching’; it was in effect an institution designed to assert the rights of Roman Catholics. The commissioners had the power to deprive any cleric of his living or to excommunicate any layman, and, perhaps more importantly, they were given the authority to regulate the schools and universities of the kingdom.

It is not at all clear that the Catholics of England, who made up some 2 to 3 per cent of the population, welcomed the efforts of their Catholic king. He was stirring up resentment, and worse, against them. Riots against ‘papists’ had broken out in certain parts of the country. They were too few, in any case, to fill up all the offices that were becoming vacant. How could they become judges when they had previously been denied entrance to the Inns of Court?

James also began the scrutiny of all those in power. In the royal closet he interviewed those who held public office as well as the members of both houses of parliament; these individual encounters became known as ‘closetings’ whereby he demanded the acquiescence of each man in his religious policies. Those who demurred were dismissed. Lord Chesterfield reported that ‘we do hear every post of so many persons being out of their employments that it seems like the account one has after a battle of those who miscarried in the engagement’. The king’s proceedings created much anger and disaffection among those who, in other circumstances, would have been faithful to him.

At the same time James also decided to gain the loyalty, or at least the acquiescence, of the nation by granting religious liberty to all of his subjects. In a declaration of indulgence, issued in the spring of 1687, he suspended ‘the execution of all penal laws for religious offences’ and lifted ‘the imposition of religious oaths or tests as qualifications for office’. Thus he materially assisted the case of his co-religionists while at the same time hoping to gain the gratitude of nonconformists. He may have believed that he could still rely upon the tacit support of the royalists and the Anglicans, even though they had been sorely stretched. In this judgement he may have been unwise. From this time forward, however, the dissenters flocked to their chapels and assemblies without the least hindrance; Macaulay observed that ‘an observant traveller will still remark the date of 1687 on some of the oldest meeting houses’.

One sign of Anglican unease emerged in the king’s decision to impose his will upon Oxford University. When the president of Magdalen College died, letters mandatory were sent by the king to the Fellows of that college for the election of Anthony Farmer; Farmer was in fact ineligible for the office, and was notable only for his Catholic sympathies. The Fellows proceeded to elect a Doctor Hough, in defiance of royal instructions. When the king visited Oxford in the course of his summer progress, he berated the recalcitrant Fellows and ordered them to leave his presence. ‘Go home,’ he said, ‘and show yourselves good members of the Church of England. Get you gone, know I am your king. I will be obeyed and I command you to be gone.’

The recently appointed ecclesiastical commission then annulled the election of Hough, whereupon twentyfive of the Fellows of Magdalen resigned or were dismissed. The college now became essentially a Catholic stronghold, and Mass was performed daily in its chapel. It was a hollow victory for the king, however, who thereby managed to alienate a great number of the clergy and to lose any reputation he hoped to gain for religious tolerance. The Magdalen affair was widely reported, adding to the anger and dismay at the king’s indifference to Anglican sensibilities.

It was widely reported, also, that in the course of the summer he made a pilgrimage to the ‘holy well’ in North Wales dedicated to St Winifred where he prayed for an heir. It was also noted that the king had knelt to the papal nuncio, Archbishop Adda, and implored his blessing. No English king had ever knelt before another man since the time of King John, and the posture was treated with embarrassment and even disgust. This was Catholicism with a vengeance. The envoy from Modena reported that ‘such of the nobility as have any credit, standing, or power in the kingdom are rarely to be seen at court’. William of Orange, staunch defender of the Protestant cause, had sent an ambassador to London who held meetings with disaffected noblemen; the prince of Orange watched and waited.

William had been appointed captain general for life of the forces of the Dutch republic and, by right of his territory of Orange, he was also a sovereign prince. His mother was Mary, eldest daughter of Charles I, and his wife, Mary, was the daughter of the present king; no doubt he considered himself to be a rightful heir to the throne, on the supposition that James had no legitimate son. He was a staunch Calvinist, like the rest of his family, and the doctrine of predestination weighed heavily upon him. If he had one duty beyond all others it was to curb the power of France; he had seen Louis XIV invade his adopted country, only to be halted by the opening of the dykes. The imperial pretensions of the House of Bourbon had not been tamed, however, and William dedicated himself to the defence of the Protestant states of Europe from the forces of the French king.

By the end of 1687 James had decided to call parliament in order formally to repeal the Test Act and the other penal laws against the exercise of religious liberty. For that purpose he decided to renew the ‘closeting’ on a local and regional level by asking all office-holders and justices of the peace whether, if elected, they would vote for repeal; if they were not standing as members of the Commons, would they at least vote for candidates who were committed to doing so? If they answered in the negative, or were equivocal, they were to be dismissed from their posts. Over 1,000 men, for example, were expelled from the borough corporations. This was another action designed to infuriate the local gentry, as well as the corporations of the towns and cities; it also served further to alienate the Anglican Church, now confirmed in its belief that Catholicism served only to reinforce arbitrary government.

At the beginning of April 1688, government agents set out with 20 shillings a day in expenses in order to prepare the ground for the coming general election; they were to liaise with the leader of the ‘court party’ in each locality, arrange for the proper distribution of court literature and counter the work of the opposition. The king’s aim was, in other words, to ‘pack’ his new parliament with his own supporters and thus clear the way for complete and uninterrupted rule. Subsequent events, however, ensured that no such parliament would ever meet.

It had already become clear that the queen, Mary of Modena, was with child. The prospect of a Catholic heir then became palpable, with all the anguish and anxiety that ensued among the Anglican and dissenting populations. The Stuart imperium might stretch on perpetually. On 7 May 1688, James reissued his declaration of indulgence, together with a promise to call parliament by the end of the year. An order followed that the declaration was to be read from the pulpits of every church on two successive Sundays. His Jesuit adviser, Father Petre, had told him that the Anglican clergy ‘should be made to eat their own dung’.

The order incited only rage and disobedience from the clergy. The archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops printed a petition for its withdrawal, on the grounds that the dispensing power assumed by the king was in fact illegal. When the petition was presented to him the king was irate. ‘This is a great surprise to me,’ he told the bishops. ‘I did not expect this from your Church, especially from some of you. This is a standard of rebellion!’ The declaration of indulgence was in fact largely ignored. Of the 9,000 churches of England, it is estimated that it was read in 200. It was read in only seven, out of one hundred, in London. When its first words were pronounced in the church of St Gregory’s by St Paul’s, the whole congregation rose and withdrew. The angry will of the king now superseded any kind of caution or circumspection. He demanded that the seven bishops be consigned to the Tower and prosecuted for publishing a seditious libel.

William was watching events as they unfolded. A swift sailing boat was continually passing over the North Sea from London to The Hague, with messages and reports designed for the sole attention of the prince of Orange.

On 10 June 1688, a son was born to James and Mary of Modena. Many disbelieved the report. It was just too convenient that a Stuart heir should emerge at this particular moment. It was rumoured that a warming pan had been used to smuggle a newborn infant into the royal chamber. Five days after the birth of the prince of Wales the seven offending bishops were brought by barge from the Tower to Westminster Hall, where they were greeted with repeated cries of ‘God bless the bishops!’ The jury, after a night’s deliberation, acquitted the bishops of publishing a seditious libel; on publication of the verdict, Westminster Hall rang with cheers and acclamations for half an hour. The news spread rapidly throughout the city, where bonfires were lit and church bells rang. Effigies of the pope were burned in the streets; in Somerset an effigy of the newborn prince was also set on fire. Most ominously for the king, perhaps, his soldiers encamped on Hounslow Heath cheered on receiving the news. When the king heard that the bishops had been acquitted, he said merely, ‘So much the worse for them.’

Yet the decision had shaken the earth beneath his feet. On the day of the acquittal seven prominent men of state – among them the earls of Devonshire, Danby and Shrewsbury – sent a secret letter to William of Orange and informed him that the vast majority of the people were ‘dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government’ and were eager for a change. If William were to invade England, he would find the nation behind him. They told him that ‘much the greatest part of the nobility and gentry’ was opposed to the king and to his policies, and that on his landing they would ‘draw great numbers’ to his side.

Even in this extremity it is unlikely that they wished to remove James from the throne. They wanted William to act in the role of a Protestant saviour who would force the king to call a free parliament, which would then settle the religious affairs of the nation and extirpate all bias towards popery. Speed, and decision, were of the essence before the king could call a ‘packed’ parliament. William was in fact already making active preparations to assemble a field army and a fleet.

By the beginning of August the news of his intentions reached England. In his diary entry for 10 August 1688, John Evelyn noted that ‘Dr Tenison now told me there would suddenly be some great thing discovered. This was the Prince of Orange intending to come over.’ An envoy from the court of Louis XIV reached James a few days later, warning him of an imminent invasion and offering him French assistance. James refused to believe the message. Could his daughter Mary conspire with her husband to depose her father? It was not possible. Would William lead his forces on a perilous expedition abroad at a moment when his country was threatened by French power? No. It was more likely that the French were trying to frighten him into an alliance with Louis XIV, an alliance that would not be to the liking of the coming parliament.

The decision was not long delayed. On 28 September William of Orange announced the forthcoming invasion of England to the States General. On the same day James proclaimed to the nation that its object was ‘an absolute conquest of these our kingdoms and the utter subduing and subjecting us and all our people to a foreign power’ and that it had been promoted ‘by certain wicked subjects for their own selfish ends’; the king also declared that he had ‘declined any foreign succours’. He was on his own.

William then issued his own declaration in which he stated that he had been invited to come over the water by ‘a great many lords both spiritual and temporal’ and that he would come simply ‘to have a free and lawful Parliament assembled as soon as is possible’. He did not mention any pretensions to the throne but stated only that ‘we for our part will concur in everything that may procure the peace and happiness of the nation’. James wished to know who these ‘many lords’, inviting William to England, might be. He questioned the bishops and asked them to sign a paper declaring their ‘abhorrence’ of the invasion but, to his surprise and dismay, they refused to do so.

He now realized the full gravity of his position, and began to make desperate efforts to reverse the policies that had alienated his kingdom. He dismissed Father Petre from his councils. He issued a declaration promising that he would ‘inviolably … preserve the Church of England’ and bar Catholics from parliament. He pledged to restore to office those justices of the peace and other local leaders whom he had summarily dismissed in the spring of the year. He stated that he would readmit the Fellows of Magdalen College whom he had banished for disobedience, and agreed that he would terminate the ecclesiastical commission that had been responsible for their punishment. The charter of the City of London, rendered forfeit six years before, was now returned to the mayor and aldermen. Yet all these palliative measures came too late, and he was now despised for weakness and vacillation.

He was resolute enough, however, in organizing his defences. He fitted out more ships to join the squadrons already at sea; they now consisted of thirty-three large ships and sixteen fire-ships. Royal commissions were sent out for the creation of new regiments and additional men were appointed to existing ones; the militia of London and the counties were called up, and ordered to stand in readiness for the defence of their country. Battalions of infantry, and regiments of cavalry, were brought back from Ireland and Scotland to serve closer to home. Sir John Lowther, a baronet who supported the cause of William, recalled that ‘nothing was left undone that might put the king in a posture to defend himself’. It was clearly within James’s power to confront and defeat the invader.

William, prince of Orange, set sail in the middle of October; it was dangerously late in the season, and a gale drove his ships back. Now that he had made his decision, however, he was determined to go on. At the beginning of November he embarked for England once more with an east wind filling his sails; it became known as ‘the Protestant wind’.

He did not come to ‘save’ Protestantism, however, except in a particular sense. His principal purpose was to find the means to contain and, if possible, curtail French power that was directed towards the United Provinces and elsewhere. He needed an English army, and English ships, for that endeavour. He could by no means be certain of the outcome. While preparing for the invasion he wrote to his principal councillor, Willem Bentinck, that ‘my sufferings, my disquiet, are dreadful. I hardly see my way. Never in my life did I so much feel the need of God’s guidance.’ Yet he was a firm believer in predestination, and now chanced all. He could not be certain that he would be welcomed; he had been advised that the majority of the English would come to his side once he arrived, but he could not be sure of this.

It was believed that he would land in the north or in the east, and James’s defences were accordingly clustered there; William himself was apprised of the decision, and determined that he would go to the relatively unprepared southwest. By the time he reached the coast of Devon, strong winds hampered the English fleet in pursuit and, at a subsequent council of war, it was determined that no attack should be made against what was considered to be a far stronger Dutch fleet. James subsequently averred that a conspiracy had been hatched among the captains, but it is far more likely that they were influenced by caution rather than treason.

The prince of Orange set foot on English soil at Brixham, at the southern end of Tor Bay, on 5 November. It was an auspicious day, the anniversary of the overthrow of the gunpowder plot and the dissolution of a papist conspiracy. The movements of William’s troops, once they had disembarked, were hampered by rain and foul roads. By 9 November William had reached Exeter, where his men were able to rest, but he was not met with any enthusiasm; the citizens treated him coldly, and at a service of thanksgiving in the cathedral the canons and most of the congregation fled. William remained in the city for nine days but no one of renown or distinction came to him; he began to believe that he had been deceived about the situation in England and seemed willing to re-embark with his men. When some local gentry did enrol under his standard he declared that ‘we expected you that dwelled so near the place of our landing would have joined us sooner’. The simple answer to his bafflement may have been that he had landed in a region where no one expected him. Supporters did now begin to march towards him.

Yet James II had not been able to take advantage of this interval in the conflict. He called back his troops who had been originally sent to the north but, when he joined them at their camp in Salisbury, he found both the officers and the men demoralized and divided. A strong king would have immediately launched an attack upon his enemy but James hesitated. Some of his commanders wished to press forward quickly, while others advised a retreat to London.

In this crisis the king himself broke down; he suffered from a catastrophic series of nosebleeds, tokens of his rising panic, that deprived him of rest. Some of his officers began to desert him and make their way to the prince of Orange, among them Lord Colchester, Lord Abingdon and Lord Cornbury; they trusted William’s declaration that he had come to save the Protestant religion and to install a free parliament. A series of local risings, in favour of parliament and Protestantism, now increased the king’s isolation; Nottingham and York, Leicester and Carlisle and Gloucester were some of the towns that declared for ‘the Protestant religion and liberty’.

In an atmosphere of confusion and intense distrust the king, seized with apprehension at the news of the desertions, decided to retreat to London. He had in effect capitulated to William without a fight. Other senior officers, among them John Churchill and the earl of Berkeley, now decided to leave him and go over to William. When the king arrived at Whitehall, and an almost empty court, he was greeted with the news that his younger daughter, Anne, had also defected to the enemy. She was a staunch Anglican who had been horrified by her father’s open espousal and encouragement of Catholicism. Under the protection of the bishop of London, she had escaped by hackney carriage to Nottingham.

The king did not know whom to trust or whom to believe any more. A courtier reported that ‘the king is much out of order, looks yellow, and takes no natural rest’. He could sleep only with the assistance of opiates. He summoned to a council all the nobles and bishops who remained in the city; they advised him that he had no recourse except to call a free parliament. On 30 November he issued a proclamation to that effect, and combined with it a pardon to all those who had risen against him. But it was too late. He had already forfeited the trust and loyalty of many of those who had been closest to him.

William was on a slow march towards London, and the king had the choice of flight or resistance. Yet where would he find the arms and the men to withstand the invader? He sent some commissioners to treat with William at Hungerford, but this was a feint to disguise his true purpose. He had already provided for the safety of his wife and son; on the night of 9 December Mary of Modena, disguised as a laundress, escaped with her child to Calais. On 11 December the king himself fled and, with two Roman Catholic companions, he crossed the Thames to Vauxhall and there took horse. It is assumed that he threw the great seal of England into the waters, so that public order could not legally be maintained by his successor. He did not think of himself as abandoning his kingdom but, rather, finding temporary security before regaining his throne. Yet he had effectively surrendered the initiative to William, who could already regard himself as the next king of England.

On the news that the king had fled, the lords spiritual and temporal formed a temporary administration in order to negotiate with the prince of Orange for the return of a free parliament designed to restore ‘our laws, our liberties and properties’. James’s departure also provoked open fury against the papist enemy; the Catholic chapels of London were fired, while the residences of the Catholic ambassadors of Spain and Florence were ransacked.

Wild rumours now spread through the country that Irish troops under the command of the king had massacred the people of London and were marching to the north. It was reported that Birmingham had been fired by the papists; Nottingham and Stafford were then said to have been sacked, with Doncaster and Huddersfield following in the line of fire. When the rumours reached Leeds that the child-eating Irish were in the suburbs, Ralph Thoresby wrote in his diary that ‘the drums beat, the bells rang backwards, the women shrieked and such dreadful consternation seized upon all persons’. The false alarm is a token of the hysterical anxiety into which the people had sunk. A doggerel song against the Irish came out of the consternation. ‘Lillibulero’ is a parody of papist sentiment and it became so popular that its composer, Thomas Wharton, declared that it had whistled a king out of three kingdoms:

Now the heretics all go down

Lillibulero bullen a la

By Christ and St Patrick’s the nation’s our own

Lillibulero bullen a la.

The music is still used as a signature tune by BBC Radio.

The king’s departure from England was now interrupted when he was discovered on a customs boat about to sail from the Isle of Sheppey; he was disguised in a short black wig and was at first mistaken for a Jesuit. When he was brought to the port of Faversham he was soon recognized and taken to the mayor’s house where he was guarded by the seamen who had found him; they wanted to claim their prize. He was by now thoroughly frightened and bewildered, at one moment pleading for a boat and at the next weeping over his misfortunes. An eyewitness, John Knatchbull, ‘observed a smile in his face of an extraordinary size and sort; so forced, awkward and unpleasant to look upon that I can truly say I never saw anything like it’.

When informed of James’s enforced sojourn in Faversham, no one in authority really knew what to do with him. He could not stay where he was. James himself then seems to have determined to return to London, where he might hold an interview with William; his messenger, bearing this news to the invader, was promptly arrested and consigned to the Tower. Who was the master now?

James, unaware of his envoy’s fate, proceeded towards the capital; as he approached Blackheath on 16 December he was greeted by cheering crowds who were no doubt hoping for an accommodation between the two parties. They were largely comprised of the ‘king and country’ stalwarts among the people, but they represented a more general sense of relief. A royalist supporter noted after the event that in the streets between Southwark and Whitehall ‘there was scarce room for coaches to pass through, and the balconies and windows besides were thronged’. The king himself was to write that it was ‘liker a day of triumph than humiliation’.

A less enthusiastic welcome also awaited him. While resting at Whitehall that evening, he was advised that all the posts were to be taken up by the Dutch guards of the prince of Orange; he would in effect be a prisoner in his own palace. In the early hours of the next day he was woken by an order from the prince commanding him to leave London by nine in the morning and travel on to Ham House. He was to depart at that time because William himself was to enter London at midday and did not wish the people to be diverted by the sight of their king. The king obeyed the order, with the exception that he wished to remove to Rochester rather than to Ham. The wish was granted but it was still clear that the monarch was a helpless captive in his own kingdom.

William himself entered the capital on 18 December to be in turn greeted by cheering crowds, bells and bonfires. He was heralded as one who had come to redeem ‘our religion, laws, liberties and lives’, but a large element of the jubilation must have come from the fact that the Protestant religion had been restored without war or revolution. They had cheered the king two days before as one who had abandoned his Catholic policies; they could equally well cheer their Protestant saviour.

The king stayed at the house of a local baronet in Rochester for a few days, but every moment he was looking for a means of escape. He feared assassination or, at best, straight imprisonment. Yet he noted that the guards about him were not strict in the performance of their duties. In truth William wanted his rival to escape as the least worst outcome of their conflict. James’s presence in the country caused difficulties of its own but, if it could be said that he had departed by his own wish, then he might be considered to have abdicated. On the night of 22 December he rose from his bed and departed through a conveniently opened back door; he walked through the garden to the shore of the Medway where a skiff was waiting for him.

Thus was accomplished what was variously called the great or prodigious ‘Revolution’ and what was eventually known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. A supporter of William, Bishop Burnet, wrote of the king that ‘his whole strength, like a spider’s web, was so irrevocably broken with a touch, that he was never able to retrieve what for want of judgement and heart, he threw up in a day’. It was not a matter of a day, however, but of years. In his obstinacy and fervent piety he had miscalculated the nature of the country; he had advanced where he should have called a halt. He had pitted the power of central government against local government to the ultimate disservice of the nation. By assaulting the sensibilities of both Anglicans and Tories he had alienated his natural supporters, and by advancing the claims of Catholics he had touched upon a very sensitive prejudice. He may not have wanted to become an absolute king, but he acted as if that were his intention. The birth of an heir stretched that prospect indefinitely.

James II spent the rest of his life in France. It was said, in his court at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, that ‘when you listen to him, you realize why he is here’. Thus ended the public life of the last Stuart king of England. We may leave the scene with the words of John Dryden from The Secular Masque:

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue.

’Tis well an old age is out,

And time to begin a new.

1. James I of England and James VI of Scotland, in the characteristically regal pose of hand on hip.

2. Anne of Denmark, James’s spouse, who became a key artistic patron in the ‘Jacobean’ age.

3. James in front of his lords, temporal and spiritual.

4. The title page of the King James Bible, one of the lasting memorials of his reign.

5. The title page of John Milton’s Areopagitica, an eloquent plea against censorship.

6. George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, loved by two sovereigns and hated by the people.

7. Henry, prince of Wales, the supposed saviour of Protestant Europe, who did not live long enough to fulfil his destiny.

8. Charles, the future Charles I, as the prince of Wales in armour.

9. Elizabeth, daughter of James I, who was briefly queen of Bohemia, otherwise known as the Winter Queen.

10. A double portrait of the unhappy Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria.

11. Three out of seven of Charles I’s children, painted by Anthony Van Dyck.

12. A disapproving illustration of the Rump Parliament, after the purge of the Long Parliament in December 1648.

13. What the Cavaliers are supposed to have done with the Puritans.

14. Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford, the dour supporter of absolute monarchy.

15. A plan of the Battle of Naseby, the outcome of which wrecked the king’s chances in the summer of 1645.

16. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles I’s senior commander, brave, but also foolhardy.

17. The trial of Charles I in Westminster Hall.

18. The result of the trial: a death warrant.

19. Cromwell, the chief of men until his death in 1658.

20. A contemporary tapestry celebrating the restoration of Charles II.

21. Charles II, the supposedly ‘merry monarch’.

22. Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II, who was reputed to have introduced tea-drinking to England.

23. Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s many mistresses, who was described by John Evelyn as ‘the curse of the nation’.

24. Nell Gwynne, the orange-seller who became a royal courtesan.

25. Louise de Kérouaille, Charles’s French mistress who became duchess of Portsmouth and who was known by Nell Gwynne as ‘Squintabella’.

26. The earl of Rochester, rake and poet who did not mince his words.

27. Samuel Pepys, who turned the diary into an art form.

28. Sir Christopher Wren, the polymath who transformed London.

29. Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest experimenter in English history.

30. Charles II in his role as patron of the Royal Society.

31. The members of the ‘Cabal’, a group of five self-interested councillors who ran a corrupt coalition around Charles II.

32. The duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son who yearned to be king.

33. The duke of York, soon to become James II, with his wife and daughters.

34. A confused scene supposedly depicting the covert arrival of an infant, ‘the warming-pan baby’, to be passed off as James II’s son.

35. The baby grows into James Francis Edward Stuart, better known to posterity as the ‘Old Pretender’ or the ‘King Over the Water’.

36. James II throwing the great seal into the Thames as he escapes from England into France.

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this third volume.

GENERAL STUDIES

G. E. Aylmer: The Struggle for the Constitution (London, 1963).

J. C. D. Clark: Revolution and Rebellion (Cambridge, 1986).

Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds): Politics, Religion and Popularity (Cambridge, 2002).

Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds): Conflict in Early Stuart England (London, 1989).

Godfrey Davies: The Early Stuarts (Oxford, 1959).

Kenneth Fincham (ed.): The Early Stuart Church (London, 1993).

S. R. Gardiner: History of England, 1603–1642. In ten volumes (London, 1899).

William Haller: The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938).

Christopher Hill: Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958).

Derek Hirst: Authority and Conflict (London, 1986).

Ronald Hutton: Debates in Stuart History (London, 2004).

J. P. Kenyon: The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966).

Peter Lake: Anglicans and Puritans? (London, 1988).

Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds): The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007).

John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc: The History of England. Volumes seven to ten (New York, 1912).

Judith Maltby: Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998).

Brian Manning: The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1976).

John Morgan: Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986).

John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds): Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1993).

J. F. H. New: Anglican and Puritan (London, 1964).

Linda Levy Peck: Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London, 1990).

H. S. Reinmuth Jnr. (ed.): Early Stuart Studies (Minneapolis, 1970).

Conrad Russell: Parliament and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979).

——— Unrevolutionary England (London, 1990).

Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London, 1989).

——— Image Wars (New Haven, 2010).

——— (ed.): Faction and Parliament (London, 1978).

Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake: Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994).

Alan Smith: The Emergence of a Nation State (London, 1984).

J. P. Sommerville: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1986).

David Starkey (ed.): The English Court (London, 1987).

Margot Todd (ed.): Reformation to Revolution (London, 1995).

Howard Tomlinson (ed.): Before the English Civil War (London, 1983).

Hugh Trevor-Roper: Historical Essays (London, 1957).

——— Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1987).

Nicholas Tyacke: Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987).

——— (ed.) The English Revolution (Manchester, 2007).

David Underdown: Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985).

J. Dover Wilson (ed.): Seventeenth Century Studies (Oxford, 1938).

Andy Wood: Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London, 2002).

JAMES VI AND I

Robert Ashton: James by his Contemporaries (London, 1969).

Bryan Bevan: King James (London, 1990).

Caroline Bingham: James of England (London, 1981).

Thomas Birch: The Court and Times of James. In two volumes (London, 1848).

Glenn Burgess: Absolute Monarchy (London, 1996).

Irene Carrier: James (Cambridge, 1998).

Thomas Cogswell: The Blessed Revolution (Cambridge, 1989).

James Doelman: King James and the Religious Culture of England (Cambridge, 2000).

Kenneth Fincham: Prelate as Pastor (Oxford, 1990).

Antonia Fraser: King James (London, 1974).

S. J. Houston: James (London, 1972).

Robert Lockyer: James (London, 1998).

David Matthew: The Jacobean Age (London, 1938).

——— James (London, 1967).

W. M. Mitchell: The Rise of the Revolutionary Party (New York, 1957).

W. B. Patterson: King James and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997).

Linda Levy Peck (ed.): The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991).

Menna Prestwich: Cranfield (Oxford, 1966).

Walter Scott: Secret History of the Court of James. In two volumes (London, 1811).

Alan G. R. Smith (ed.): The Reign of James (London, 1973).

Alan Stewart: The Cradle King (London, 2003).

Roy Strong: Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 2000).

Roland Usher: The Reconstruction of the English Church. In two volumes (New York, 1910).

D. H. Willson: King James (London, 1956).

CHARLES I

G. E. Aylmer: The King’s Servants (London, 1961).

Thomas Birch and Cyprien de Gamache: The Court and Times of Charles I. In two volumes (London, 1848).

Charles Carlton: Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London, 1983).

Hester Chapman: Great Villiers (London, 1949).

H. P. Cooke: Charles I and his Earlier Parliaments (London, 1939).

E. S. Cope: Politics without Parliaments (London, 1987).

Richard Cust: Charles I: A Political Life (London, 2005).

C. W. Daniels and John Morrill: Charles I (Cambridge, 1988).

Isaac Disraeli: Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I. In five volumes (London, 1828–1831).

Christopher Durston: Charles I (London, 1998).

J. H. Hexter: The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

Christopher Hibbert: Charles I (London, 2007).

F. M. G. Higham: Charles I (London,1932).

Clive Holmes: Why Was Charles I Executed? (London, 2006).

David Matthew: The Social Structure in Caroline England (Oxford, 1948).

——— The Age of Charles I (London, 1951).

Brian Quintrell: Charles I (London, 1993).

L. J. Reeve: Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989).

Conrad Russell: The Fall of the British Monarchies (Oxford, 1991).

Kevin Sharpe: The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992).

Hugh Trevor-Roper: Archbishop Laud (London, 1940).

C. V. Wedgwood: The King’s Peace (London, 1955).

——— Thomas Wentworth (New York, 1962).

G. M. Young: Charles I and Cromwell (London, 1935).

OLIVER CROMWELL

Maurice Ashley: The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1957).

Hilaire Belloc: Cromwell (London, 1934).

John Buchan: Cromwell (London, 1934).

Barry Coward: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1991).

J. C. Davis: Oliver Cromwell (London, 2001).

C. H. Firth: Cromwell (London, 1901).

Antonia Fraser: Cromwell (London, 1973).

S. R. Gardiner: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1901).

Peter Gaunt: Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 1996).

François Guizot: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1879).

Christopher Hill: God’s Englishman (London, 1971).

Roger Howell: Cromwell (London, 1977).

Frank Kitson: Old Ironsides (London, 2004).

John Morley: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1904).

John Morrill (ed.): Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2007).

Micheál Ó Siochrú: God’s Executioner (London, 2008).

C. V. Wedgwood: Oliver Cromwell (London, 1973).

CIVIL WAR

John Adamson: The Noble Revolt (London, 2007).

Michael Braddick: God’s Fury, England’s Fire (London, 2008).

Charles Carlton: Going to the Wars (London, 1992).

Edward, earl of Clarendon: The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. In six volumes (Oxford, 1888).

David Cressy: England on Edge (Oxford, 2007).

Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds): The English Civil War (London, 1997).

Barbara Donagan: War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008).

Anthony Fletcher: The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981).

S. R. Gardiner: History of the Great Civil War. In four volumes (London, 1888).

Peter Gaunt (ed.): The English Civil War (Oxford, 2000).

Ian Gentles: The English Revolution (London, 2007).

Christopher Hill: The English Revolution (London, 1940).

Ann Hughes: The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1991).

Ronald Hutton: The Royalist War Effort (London, 1982).

D. E. Kennedy: The English Revolution (London, 2000).

John Kenyon: The Civil Wars of England (London, 1988).

Mark Kishlansky: The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979).

Jason McElligott and David Smith (eds): Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007).

Allan Macinnes: The British Revolution (London, 2005).

Brian Manning (ed.): Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973).

Michael Mendle (ed.): The Putney Debates (Cambridge, 2001).

John Morrill: The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976).

——— The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).

——— (ed.) Reactions to the English Civil War (London, 1982).

Jason Peacey (ed.): The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (London, 2001).

R. C. Richardson: The Debate on the English Revolution (London, 1977).

Ivan Roots: The Great Rebellion (London, 1966).

Conrad Russell (ed.): The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973).

David Scott: Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (London, 2004).

Lawrence Stone: The Causes of the English Revolution (London, 1972).

John Stubbs: Reprobates (London, 2011).

David Underdown: Pride’s Purge (Oxford, 1971).

Malcolm Wanklyn: The Warrior Generals (London, 2010).

C. V. Wedgwood: The King’s War (London, 1958).

Austin Woolrych: Britain in Revolution (Oxford, 2002).

Blair Worden: The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974).

——— The English Civil Wars (London, 2009).

COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE

G. E. Aylmer (ed.): The Interregnum (London, 1972).

Toby Barnard: The English Republic (London, 1982).

Jakob Bowman: The Protestant Interest in Cromwell’s Foreign Relations (Heidelberg, 1900).

Barry Coward: The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester, 2002).

C. H. Firth: The Last Years of the Protectorate. In two volumes (London, 1909).

S. R. Gardiner: History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In four volumes (London, 1903).

William Haller: Liberty and Information in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955).

Ronald Hutton: The British Republic (London, 1990).

William Lamont: Godly Rule (London, 1969).

Jason McElligott: Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007).

John Morrill (ed.): Revolution and Restoration (London, 1992).

Robert Paul: The Lord Protector (London, 1955).

David Smith (ed.): Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003).

Michael Walzer: The Revolution of the Saints (New York, 1974).

Austin Woolrych: Commonwealth to Protectorate (London, 1980).

——— England without a King (London, 1983).

CHARLES II

Maurice Ashley: Charles II (London, 1973).

Robert Bosher: The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London, 1951).

Hester Chapman: The Tragedy of Charles II (London, 1964).

Raymond Crawfurd: The Last Days of Charles II (Oxford, 1909).

Godfrey Davies: The Restoration of Charles II (London, 1955).

Antonia Fraser: King Charles II (London, 1979).

Tim Harris: Restoration (London, 2005).

Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds): The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford, 1990).

Cyril Hartmann: Clifford of the Cabal (London, 1937).

Ronald Hutton: The Restoration (Oxford, 1985).

———: Charles II (Oxford, 1989).

Matthew Jenkinson: Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II (Woodbridge, 2010).

J. R. Jones: The First Whigs (Oxford, 1961).

——— Charles II (London, 1987).

——— (ed.) The Restored Monarchy (London, 1979).

J. P. Kenyon: Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, 1641–1702 (London, 1958).

Anna Keay: The Magnificent Monarch (London, 2008).

Maurice Lee Jnr: The Cabal (Urbana, 1965).

John Miller: Charles II (London, 1991).

——— After the Civil Wars (London, 2000).

Annabel Patterson: The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven, 2008).

Stephen Pincus: Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge, 1996).

Paul Seaward: The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime (Cambridge, 1988).

Thomas Slaughter: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia, 1984).

Jenny Uglow: A Gambling Man (London, 2009).

Brian Weiser: Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge, 2003).

JAMES II

John Callow: The Making of King James II (Stroud, 2000).

Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.): By Force or By Default? (Edinburgh, 1989).

Lionel Glassey (ed.): The Reigns of Charles II and James II (London, 1997).

Tim Harris: Revolution (London, 2006).

J. R. Jones: The Revolution of 1688 in England (London, 1972).

T. B. Macaulay: The History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1848).

John Miller: Popery and Politics in England (Cambridge, 1973).

——— James II (London, 1978).

W. A. Speck: Reluctant Revolutionaries (Oxford, 1988).

——— James II (London, 2002).

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

I have not included studies of individual authors mentioned in the text.

Maurice Ashley: Life in Stuart England (London, 1964).

David Cressy: Bonfires and Bells (London, 1989).

Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.): The Stuart Courts (Stroud, 2000).

Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds): Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994).

Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden (eds): Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1998).

Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann: The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Woman (London, 2011).

Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds): A Nation Transformed (Cambridge, 2001).

Ronald Hutton: The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994).

N. H. Keeble: The Restoration. England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2002).

W. K. Jordan: The Development of Religious Toleration in England (London, 1936).

Gerald MacLean: Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration (Cambridge 1995).

Allardyce Nicoll: Stuart Masques (New York, 1968).

Rosemary O’Day: The English Clergy (Leicester, 1979).

David Ogg: England in the Reign of Charles II. In two volumes (Oxford, 1934).

Stephen Orgel: The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong: Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court. In two volumes (London, 1973).

Graham Parry: The Golden Age Restor’d (Manchester, 1981).

R. Malcolm Smuts: Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987).

——— (ed.) The Stuart Court and Europe (Cambridge 1996).

John Spurr: England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000).

Roy Strong: Art and Power (Woodbridge, 1984).

Blair Worden: Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford, 2007).

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your ereading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abbot, George, archbishop of Canterbury: supports Villiers; hostility to Catholics; succeeds Bancroft as archbishop; objects to Frances Howard’s divorce from Essex; attends Frances’s wedding to Somerset; replaced as archbishop; death; and war in Palatinate

‘Abhorrers, the’

Abingdon, James Bertie, earl of

Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets (1650)

Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660)

Act of Settlement (1652)

Act of Uniformity (1662)

Adda, Ferdinando d’, archbishop of Amasia (papal nuncio)

‘Addle Parliament’, see under Parliament

‘Agreement of the People’ (pamphlet)

agriculture: revolution

Amboyna: massacre (1623)

America: English colonists in

Andrewes, Lancelot, bishop of Winchester

Anne, Princess (Charles II’s daughter)

Anne, Princess (James II’s daughter)

Anne of Denmark, wife of James I: coronation; extravagance; mourns death of Prince Henry; supports George Villiers; declines to visit Scotland; death

apprentices: demonstrate

Archie (court fool)

Arlington, Henry Bennet, 1st earl of

Arminians

Arminius, Jacobus

army (English): conditions; James II maintains; see also New Model Army

Arnold, Matthew

Arundel, Thomas Howard, 2nd earl of

Ashe, John

Astley, Sir Jacob

Atkyns, Richard

Aubrey, John

Audley End

Aylesbury, Robert Bruce, 1st earl of

Bacon, Sir Francis: on Salisbury (Cecil); on Commons opposition to James I; on Prince Henry; ambitions on death of Salisbury; and Villiers’ rise as favourite; on natural sciences; prose style; The Advancement of Learning; The New Atlantis

Baillie, Robert

Balfour, Sir William

Bancroft, Richard: bishop of London; archbishop of Canterbury

Baptists

Barbados

Barebone, Isaac Praise-God

‘Barebone’s Parliament’, see under Parliament

Barkstead, Colonel John

baron, Hartgill

Barrington, Thomas and Judith

Bastwick, John; The Litany of John Bastwick

Bate, John

Batten, Sir William

Baxter, Richard

Bedford, Francis Russell, 4th earl of

Bennet, Thomas

Bentinck, Willem (later 1st earl of Portland)

Berkeley, George, 1st earl of

Berkley, Sir John

Berulle, Father

Berwick: peace treaty negotiated (1639)

Bethlehem Hospital

Bible, Holy: King James version

Bide, Sir Thomas

Birch, Colonel John

Bishop, Captain

bishops: in Lords; threatened; bill of exclusion from parliament

Bishops’ War: First (1639); Second (1640)

Blackstone, Sir William: Commentaries on the Laws of England

Blackwall, Essex

Blake, Admiral Robert

Bloody Assizes (1685)

Bohemia

Bombay: as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry

Bond, John

Book of Common Prayer: puritans ordered to conform to; replaced by Directory of Worship; and Act of Uniformity (1661)

books: publication and control

Boteler, Major-General William

Bothwell Bridge, battle of (1679)

Boyle, Robert; Hydrostatical Paradoxes

Bradshaw, John

Breda, Netherlands; declaration of (1660)

Brentford, Middlesex

Bright, Ellen

Brislington, Somerset

Bristol: Prince Rupert captures and secures; falls to parliamentarians

Bristol, John Digby, 1st earl of

Broderick, Allan

Brooke, Robert Greville, 2nd baron

‘Brothers of the Blade, The’ (dialogue)

Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st duke of: as James I’s favourite; titles; dancing; uses sedan chair; supposed influence on James I; trip to Spain to make marriage arrangements for Prince Charles; mother converts to Catholicism; hatred of Spain; Spanish envoys accuse of conspiring against James; and power of parliament; urges alliance with France against Spain; final letter from James; as principal councillor for Charles I; escorts Henrietta Maria from Paris; incompetence at Breda; parliament criticizes; Protestantism; unpopularity; mismanages Cadiz expedition; impeachment; residence struck by ‘water-pillar’; Charles orders to expel Queen’s French attendants; sends naval expedition against France; military failures; parliamentary remonstrance against; and death of Dr Lambe; plans relief of La Rochelle; stabbed to death; funeral

Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd duke of: in Charles II’s entourage; as Charles II’s first minister; secret negotiations with France; arraigned and removed from office; opposes Danby; on suspension of parliament; imprisoned in Tower and released

Bunyan, John; Grace Abounding; The Pilgrim’s Progress

Burgh, John

Burghley, William Cecil, 1st baron

Burnet, Gilbert, bishop of Salisbury

Burton, Henry

Burton, Robert: The Anatomy of Melancholy

Burton, Thomas

Byron, Sir Nicholas

cabal: formed under Charles II; disbanded

Cadiz

Calvinists: in Germany; and Arminians; Laud attacks; doctrines suppressed

Campbell, John, baron

Carew, Thomas

Carey, Sir Robert

Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight

Carleton, Dudley

Carlisle, James Hay, 1st earl of

Carlyle, Thomas

Carr, Sir Robert

Carter, Richard: ‘The Schismatic Stigmatised’

‘Case of the Armie Truly Stated, The’ (pamphlet)

Castlemaine, Barbara, countess of

Catesby, Robert

Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II: marriage; and Charles’s mistresses; Titus Oates accuses of high treason

Catholic League

Catholics: and banishment of Jesuits; and Gunpowder Plot; and oath of allegiance; James I’s hostility to; and Bohemian crisis; parliament’s petitions against (1621); Spanish and French demand toleration and rights in England; and collapse of French embassy with fatalities; popular hostility to; granted liberties under James I; Charles I declares free of persecution; penal laws reinstituted (1625); Charles I banishes from court; and Charles I’s agreement with French to grant freedom of worship; Laud’s distaste for; and Irish rebellion; as royalists; land forfeited in Ireland; and Charles II’s declaration of indulgence; and Test Act; and Popish Plot; James II practises as and favours

‘Cavalier Parliament’, see under Parliament

cavaliers: as term; army strength; behaviour; see also royalists

Cavendish, William (later 1st duke of Newcastle)

Cavendish, William, Lord see Devonshire, 4th earl of

Cecil, Sir Edward

Chalgrave, battle of (1643)

Chamberlain, John

Charles I, King: and death of brother Henry; prospective marriage to infanta of Spain; douses Villiers in water; character and qualities; and sister Elizabeth’s exile; trip to Spain to visit prospective bride; signs marriage contract but withdraws; assumes authority during father’s decline; urges war with Spain; betrothal to Henrietta Maria; organizes masque; accession; manner and style; stutter; appearance; marriage; calls first parliament; finances and funding; on royal authority; and Catholicism; marriage relations; coronation; addresses to parliament; defends Buckingham against parliamentary impeachment; conflict with parliament over sovereignty; dissolves parliament (1626); religious practices; banishes Catholics from court; demands loans from counties and peers; antagonizes judiciary; and summary imprisonment; relations to law; and death of Buckingham; takes control of administration after Buckingham’s death; irresolution over foreign wars; and religious authority; attacks Eliot; dissolves 1629 parliament; and nine imprisoned members of parliament; personal rule (1629–40); foreign policy; imposition of taxes and rights; art collection and patronage; statues and paintings of; birth of son Charles; peaceful years; interest in local government; claims sovereignty in all seas; crowned king of Scotland; visits Edinburgh; unpopularity; religious rules for Scottish Church defied; prerogative challenged in trial of John Hampden; insistence on royal power; sends military supplies north against Scots; raises forces at York against Scots (1639); in Bishops’ War against Scots; parliament defies (1640); orders judicial torture of rioting apprentice; moves to counter Scots in Second Bishops’ War; defeated at Newburn; summons great council of peers (1640); negotiates with Scots; and fall of Strafford; challenged by parliament; confidence; cancels exaction of ship-money; summons parliament to Banqueting House (January 1641); divides opposition; and Strafford’s trial; signs Bill of Attainder against Strafford; loyal supporters; plans visit to Scotland (1641); returns to London from Edinburgh; and Irish rebellion; seeks impeachment of members of parliament; leaves London (1642); writes to parliament requesting authority and revenues be preserved; denies parliamentary declaration; travels to York (1642); refused entry to Hull; raises volunteer army; rejects parliament’s nineteen propositions; prepares for war; raises standard in Nottingham (1642); army strength; at Edgehill; establishes headquarters in Oxford; withdraws from Turham Green; captures Marlborough; advances on Gloucester; disagreements at court of; summons parliament of supporters in Oxford (1644); flees Oxford for Worcester; defeated at Naseby; Milton denounces; and Scots’ readiness to negotiate; and loss of Bristol; negotiates with Presbyterians and Independents; surrenders to Scots; refuses to take covenant; Scots surrender to parliament for cash; touches for king’s evil; travels to London; New Model Army’s dealings with; and army’s Heads of Proposals; at Hampton Court; discussed at Putney debates; in Isle of Wight; agrees ‘Engagement’ with Scots; attempts escape from Carisbrooke Castle; treats with parliamentary commissioners; seeks to raise army in Ireland; trial and death sentence; execution; images removed

Charles II, King: birth; joins father at Greenwich (1642); accompanies father to York; in civil war; letter of resolution from father; exile abroad; proclaimed king by Scots; invited to Scotland (1650); crosses into England; crowned king of Scotland; escapes to France; correspondence with supporters in England; moves from France to Spanish Netherlands; Spain supports; waits in Flanders to invade England; and Monck’s position in London; issues declaration from Breda; returns to England and restored to throne; appearance and character; bored by administrative business; diminished royal power; practises king’s touch; religious faith; coronation; marriage to Catherine; mistresses and illegitimate children; court libertinage and cynicism; petitioned by Quaker woman; declarations of indulgence (on religious toleration); direct help in Great Fire of London; arouses popular distrust; dismisses Clarendon; forms cabal; negotiates Triple Alliance; relations with Louis XIV; expresses desire to convert to Catholicism; receives subsidies from France; declares war on Dutch (1672); suspends repayment of loans (‘the stop’); cancels declaration of indulgence; prorogues parliament (1674 & 1675); closes coffee-houses; secret treaty with Louis XIV; differences with parliament; parliament grants money for war against France; ‘Popish Plot’ against life; dissolves Cavalier Parliament (January 1679); dissolves privy council and forms new council; prorogues parliament (1679); fears for survival; and James as successor; proclaims Monmouth’s illegitimacy; serious illness (1679); prorogues parliament (1680); and exclusion crisis; orders new assembly in Oxford (1681); decides on personal rule; Rye House Plot against; final illness and death; received into Roman Catholic communion

Chatham: Dutch penetrate defences (1667)

Cheriton, battle of (1644)

Chester: falls in civil war

Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 2nd earl of

chocolate

Christian, duke of Brunswick

Christian IV, king of Denmark

Christina, queen of Sweden

Christmas: abolished (1644)

Church of England (Anglicanism): and authority; Laud’s ‘Declaration’ on; alliance with Crown in cleansing kingdom; practices and rituals; clergy required to take oath; convocation supports Charles I; reforms (1640); imposed on nation; in eighteenth century; Danby champions

Church of Scotland: Charles I’s canons and Service Book for; and national covenant; general assembly meets (1636); bishops removed; see also Presbyterians

Churchill, John (later 1st duke of Marlborough)

civil war (1642–6): beginnings and causes; divided loyalties; soldiers; financing; peace calls; conduct of and engagements; siege warfare; second (1648); casualties

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of: on Digby; on Charles I’s insecurity; on Charles I’s unpopularity; on Hampden trial; on Charles I raising forces at York; on Berwick peace negotiations; serves in 1640 parliament; on accusations against Strafford; on Irish rebellion; on parliament’s unpopularity; on loss of navy to Charles I; on beginning of civil war; disparages Essex; on Prince Rupert; praises Cromwell as commander; on Charles I’s trial; on Cromwell’s assumption of power; Broderick reports on disaffection to; as Lord Chancellor under Charles II; disparages Quakers; mediates for Charles II; on Charles II’s discomposure; and sale of Dunkirk to French; fall from favour and dismissal; exile; History of the Rebellion

Clarkson, Laurence

Claypole, Elizabeth (née Cromwell; Oliver’s daughter)

Claypole, John

Clement X, Pope: burnt in effigy

Cleveland, John

Clifford, Thomas, 1st baron

Clotworthy, John

Clough, William

clubmen

Cobham, Henry Brooke, 8th baron

coffee

coffee-houses; closed by Charles II and reopened

Coke, Sir Edward: dispute with James I over law; and Overbury murder; James I rebukes and dismisses; hostility to Spain; imprisoned; on Charles I’s finances; criticizes Buckingham; bill prohibiting detention without trial

Coke, Roger: A Discourse of Trade

Colchester, Lord (1688)

Colchester, siege of (1648)

Coleman, Edward

Collection of Anecdotes and Remarkable Characters, A

committee of safety: formed (1659)

Commons, House of: on established church; business under James I; and taxation under James I; and financing of James I; opposes Buckingham; claims authority to determine country’s religion; ‘Grand Remonstrance’ (religious manifesto); inactivity; and Charles I’s visit to Scotland; sends declaration to counties; Vote of No Addresses on Charles I; call for treaty with Charles I; differences with Lords; in exclusion crisis; see also parliament

Conventicle Act (1664)

‘Convention Parliament’, see under Parliament

Conway, Edward, 2nd viscount

Cook, John

Cornbury, Edward Hyde, viscount (later 3rd earl of Clarendon)

Cornwallis, Sir Charles

Corporation Act (1661)

Cottington, Sir Francis, baron

Cotton, Sir John

Cotton, Robert

council of the north: abolished

council of state: Cromwell forms

counties: government and administration

court of highs commission (religious): abolished

Coventry, Sir Henry

Coventry: parliamentary prisoners in

Cranfield, Lionel

Cromwell, General Lord

Cromwell, Henry (Oliver’s son)

Cromwell, Oliver: as member of 1628 parliament; criticizes Laud; Philip Warwick describes; on ‘Grand Remonstrance’; low estimate of parliamentary army; forms elite regiment; engages royalist force at Grantham; favours religious toleration and plurality; as Independent; and Charles’s advance on Gloucester; in committee of two kingdoms; promoted lieutenant-general of eastern association; background, character and religious faith; victory at Marston Moor; appearance; differences with Manchester; forms New Model Army; as second-in-command of New Model Army at Naseby; on victory over royalists; collapse and near-death; Lilburne writes to and praises; and army discontent; in new general council of army; and removal of Charles I from Holmby House to London; in New Model Army’s march on London; negotiates with captured Charles I; at Putney debates; openly breaks with Charles I; throws cushion at Ludlow; subdues rebels in Wales; commands at battle of Preston; considers fate of Charles I; at Charles I’s trial; heads council of state; made commander-in-chief of army; optimism; Lilburne attacks; travels to Ireland and suppresses rebellion; campaign in Scotland (1650); illness in Scotland; final battle at Worcester; returns to London and rewarded; aims and reforms; dissolves parliament (1653); dominance and authority; reconstitutes parliament; as Lord Protector; abused; administration and ordinances; assassination attempts on; calls parliament (1654); venture in West Indies; orders reform of manners; depression; proposed as king but declines; posthumous reputation; enjoys festivities and pleasures; health decline and death; dissolves parliament (1658); openly criticized; Marvell’s poems on; funeral

Cromwell, Richard (Oliver’s son): succeeds father; abdicates; declines army request for commanding officer; rumoured return to office; flees to exile in Europe

customs and festivals

Cutpurse, Moll

Dade, William: Prognostications

Danby, Thomas Osborne, 1st earl of (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds); released from Tower; invites William of Orange to invade

Davenant, John, bishop of Salisbury

Davenant, Sir William; Salmacida Spolia (masque); The Tragedy of Albovine (play)

Davies, Lady Eleanor

decimation tax

Declaration of the Army (1646)

Declaration of Sports

Dekker, Thomas: The Seven Deadly Sins of London

Denmark: England proposes holy crusade against Catholic powers

Derby, James Stanley, 7th earl of

Dering, Sir Edward

Desborough, John

Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th earl (later 1st duke) of

D’Ewes, Simonds: criticizes Commons’ behaviour; on Cotton’s decline; on Charles I’s demand for ship-money; on Strafford’s trial; on ‘Grand Remonstrance’; on 1641 election; on Charles I’s military officers; on effect of parliamentary declaration on opponents in civil war; on women’s peace demonstration

Diggers

Digges, Sir Dudley

Dillingham, John

Discourse of the Religion of England

dissenters (nonconformists): proliferation; under Charles II; granted freedom of worship (1672); under James II

Donne, John

Dorchester, Catherine Sedley, countess of

Dort, synod of (1618)

Doves, Samuel

Dowdall, Lady Elizabeth

Dowland, John

drama see theatre

dress and fashion: under Charles II

Drogheda, Ireland

Dryden, John: on battle of Lowestoft; as dramatist; Absalom and Achitophel; The Secular Masque

Dublin: rebellion (1641)

Duckenfield, Colonel Robert

Duke of York’s Servants (theatre company)

Dunbar, battle of (1650)

Dunkirk: sold to French; Anglo-French alliance against

Dutch Republic: in Triple Alliance (1668); provokes near war with England (1623); defensive league with England; treaty with England (1625); alliance with France; attacks Spanish fleet (1639); as trade rival; war with England (1665–7); defensive treaty with France (1666); peace negotiations; raid into England (1667); Anglo-French secret treaty against; French and English war with (1672–4); merchant vessels elude English navy; French successes against; and marriage of Princess Mary and William; Louis XIV makes peace with

Earle, John

Earle, Sir Walter

East India Company: rivalry with Dutch; trade with Russia

eastern association

Edgehill, battle of (1642)

Edinburgh: Charles I visits (1633); (1641); James I visits (1617); Charles I’s religious orders defied; draws up national covenant; parliament meets (1640); supposed conspiracy (’the incident’); see also Scotland

Edward III, King

Edwards, Thomas: Gangraena

elections (parliamentary): (1639); (1640); (1659); (1679); (1688); see also Commons, House of; Parliament

Eliot, Sir John: on failure of 1621 parliament; on impeachment of earl of Middlesex; on death of James I; criticizes Charles I in parliament; criticizes Buckingham; taken to Tower and released; speechmaking and oratory; on power of bishops; imprisoned; death

Eliot, T. S.

Elizabeth, Princess (Charles I’s daughter)

Elizabeth, Princess (later queen of Bohemia)

Elizabeth I, Queen: death and succession

Ellesmere, Sir Thomas Egerton, baron

England: economic problems; prosperity and trade; population increases; social divisions; Dutch trade rivalry; troops conscripted for European service; war with Spain (1625); peace with France (1629); harvest failure (1630) and food riots; secret treaty with Spain (1634); and beginnings of war against Scots; labourers and craftsmen pressed into Charles I’s military service; harvest failures (1646–51); commonwealth proclaimed; post-civil-war condition; foreign relations under commonwealth; Cromwell divides into eleven districts; Spain declares war on (1655); power and administration under Charles II; war with Dutch (1665–7); war with France (1666–7); proliferation of Christian sects; war with Dutch (1672); peace with Dutch (1674); economic and social improvements following second Dutch war; industrial development; standing army under James II

Essex, Arthur Capel, 1st earl of

Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of: marriage to and divorce from Frances Howard; dismissed by Charles I; as member of committee for petitions; as privy councillor; as lord chamberlain; commands parliamentary army; proposes truce offer to Charles I and deciding battle; relieves Gloucester; advances on Oxford; in committee of both kingdoms; favours accommodation with Charles I; criticized; laments Laud’s death; removed from military command

‘etcetera oath, the’

Etherege, Sir George: She Wou’d if She Cou’d

Eure, Margaret

Evelyn, John: on Charles I’s return from negotiations with Scots; on apparition; attends Anglican service; on women’s behaviour; on Cromwell’s funeral; on Richard Cromwell’s dissolving parliament; witnesses return of Charles II; on changes under Charles II; on Charles II’s gambling; on Great Fire of London; disparages Charles II’s entourage; on battle of Sole Bay; on duke of York’s Catholicism; on Rye House plot; on dissoluteness of Charles II’s court; on James II’s summary acts; on impending invasion by William of Orange

Everard, William

excise (tax): introduced

Exclusion Bills (1679); (1681)

Fairfax, Sir Ferdinando

Fairfax, Sir Thomas: commands New Model Army; besieges and captures Bristol; greets Charles I; petition of complaint from army; in army’s march on London; in second civil war; besieges Colchester; and trial of Charles I; opposes Lilburne; refuses to invade Scotland

Fanshawe, Anne, Lady (née Harrison)

Fanshawe, Sir Richard

Farmer, Anthony

farming see agriculture

Farnham Castle

Fauconberg, Mary, countess (née Cromwell; Oliver’s daughter)

Fauconberg, Thomas, earl

Fawkes, Guy

Feake, Christopher

Felton, John

fens: drained

Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor (earlier archduke)

Fifth Monarchy men

Finch, Heneage

Finch, Sir John

five knights case

fleet (English): failed attack on Cadiz; sails against France (1627); rebuilt and sails (1635); supports parliament; dominance; strengthened under Charles II; parliament money to (1675); Pepys develops for James II

Fleetwood, Major-General Charles

food and drink: under Charles II

Fox, George

Foxe, John: Acts and Monuments

France: demands liberties for English Catholics; as prospective ally against Spain; Protestants under threat; expedition against (1627); peace with England (1629); alliance with Dutch; rumoured potential invasion by; payments to Charles II; Cromwell makes treaty with (1655); relations with England under Charles II; Dunkirk sold to; occupies St Kitts; war with England (1666–7); Triple Alliance against; Charles II forms anti-Dutch alliance with; war on Dutch (1672); fleet inactive at battle of the Texel; successes against United Provinces; see also Louis XIV, king of France

Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate (later king of Bohemia)

Fuller, Thomas

furniture

Galileo Galilei

Gataker, Thomas

gentry: rise under James I; authority

Gerard, Father John, SJ

Glanville, John

Glorious Revolution (1688)

Gloucester: in civil war

Goaden v. Hales (lawsuit)

Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry

Gondomar, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of

Goodwin, Thomas

Gramont, comte de

‘Grand Remonstrance’

Great Britain: as title; see also England

Green Ribbon Club

Grenville, Sir John

Gresham College, London

Grimstone, Harbottle

Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lincoln

Gunpowder Plot (1605)

Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden

Gwyn, Nell

Habeas Corpus Act (1679); James II wishes to repeal

Habsburg family: and Bohemia

hackney carriages

Halifax, George Savile, 1st marquess of

Hall, Joseph: Characters of Virtues and Vices

Hallam, Henry

Halley, Edmund

Hamilton, James, 1st duke of

Hamilton, James, 2nd marquess of

Hammond, Colonel Robert

Hampden, John: imprisoned; tried before court of exchequer; supports Scots against Charles I; supports Providence Island Company; Strafford threatens; impeachment charges against; and Cromwell’s low estimate of parliamentary army; dies of wounds

Hampton Court: conference (1604); Charles I at

Harington, Sir John: on Hampton Court debate; on court behaviour; Suffolk advises on gaining favour at court; appointed tutor to Prince Henry

Harley, Lady Brilliana

Harrington, James: Oceana

Harrison, Sir John

Haselrig, Sir Arthur

Hastings, Henry

Hatfield House, Hertfordshire

Heads of the Proposals

hearth tax (1662)

Henri IV, king of France: assassinated

Henrietta Anne, Princess, duchess of Orléans

Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I: betrothal; marriage; Catholicism; marriage relations; declines to attend coronation; French attendants sent home; poverty; birth of son Charles; in masques and theatrical pieces; offended by Prynne; on Scottish service book; supports husband; defies parliamentary control of court and council; threatened with impeachment; leaves for Holland (1642); sends arms from Holland; returns from exile in war; exile abroad; mediates between Charles II and Louis XIV

Henry, Philip

Henry, Prince (Charles I’s son)

Henry, prince of Wales: tutored by Harington; character; betrothal to Maria Anna; death

Herbert, Sir Edward

Heylyn, Peter

Heyman, Sir Peter

Hobbes, Thomas: on death of Laud; career; and political theory; Leviathan

Holborne, Sir Robert

Holland, Henry Rich, 1st earl of

Holland: Henrietta Maria travels to; see also Dutch Republic

Hollar, Wenceslaus

Holles, Denzil; impeachment charges against

Holmby House, Northamptonshire

Holt, Wiltshire

Holy Roman Empire: in Thirty Years War

honours: sale under James I

Hooke, Robert

Hopkins, Sir William

Hopton, Sir Ralph

Hotham, Sir John, as governor of Hull

Hough, John, bishop of Worcester

Houghton, John: Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade

Hounslow Heath

Howard family: oppose Buckingham

Howe, John Grubham

Hudlestone, John

Huguenots; see also Protestantism

Hull: military arsenal; Charles I denied entry

Hunt, Leigh

Huntingdon, Henry Hastings, 5th earl of

Hurst Castle, Hampshire

Hutchinson, George

Hutchinson, Colonel John

Hutchinson, Lucy (née Apsley); Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson

hygiene: Pepys and

‘incident, the’

Independents (sect)

‘Instrument of Government’ (Lambert’s)

intelligencers (busy-bodies)

Ireland: Strafford (Wentworth) in; rebellion (1641); social structure and land ownership; English forces sent to; New Model Army destined for; Charles I seeks to raise army in; Cromwell deputed to subdue; Cromwell travels to and suppresses; Act of Settlement (1652); ordinance incorporating into commonwealth

Ireton, Sir Henry

Ironsides

Jaffray, Alexander

Jamaica

James, Henry

James I, king of England (James VI of Scotland): accession to English throne; journey from Edinburgh to London; appearance and manner; creates new knights; coronation; plot against; personal retinue and court; clerical and religious discussions; learning; relations with Parliament; honoured and praised; hunting; informed of Gunpowder Plot; court laxity and excesses; behaviour; favourites; extravagance and debts; view of law; financial situation; and royal power; joins Protestant Union; sells honours and titles; progress to Newark (1612); and Somerset’s self-pardon; health declines; rebukes judges; progress to Edinburgh (1617); and Bohemian crisis; progress (1620); and parliament’s petitions against Catholics and Spain; Mytens portrait; loses popular support; fears treason; thrown from horse and falls through ice; and son Charles’s visit to Spain with Buckingham; near-war with Dutch (1623); and prospective war with Spain; final letter to Buckingham; death; called ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’; attends and finances masques; religious views; distributes land in Ireland; Basilikon Doron; Declaration of Sports

James II, king (earlier James, duke of York): marriage to Anne Hyde; Catholicism; sea victory over Dutch; assists in Great Fire of London; retires from public life; marriage to Mary of Modena; Charles II tells of French subsidies; and rumoured plot against Charles II; Shaftesbury opposes as successor to Charles II; refuses to return to Anglicanism and takes exile in Spanish Netherlands; in exclusion crisis; Charles II’s low opinion of; contends for throne; regains powers; character and qualities; succeeds to throne; maintains standing army; appoints Catholic officers to army and navy; relations with Louis XIV; tensions with parliament; declaration of indulgence order; and William of Orange’s invasion; opposes William of Orange; flees, apprehended and returned to London; allowed to escape abroad; exile in France

Jeffreys, George, 1st baron (Judge)

Jesuits: banished (1604); and Gunpowder Plot; parliament denounces; rumoured Popish Plot against Charles II

Johnson, Robert

Jones, Inigo

Jonson, Ben: writes plays on ambition and corruption; on Salisbury; masques; Bartholomew Fair; Love Restored; News from the New World; Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue; Sejanus

Joyce, Cornet

judges: loyalties in civil war

Junto, the (puritan)

justices of the peace

Juxon, Thomas

Juxon, William, bishop of London

Ketch, Jack

Keymis, Lawrence

Keynes, John Maynard

Kid’s Coffee House (the Amsterdam)

Kilfenny Castle, Limerick

Killigrew, Thomas

King’s Players, the (theatre company)

Kirk see Church of Scotland

Kirkby, Christopher

Knatchbull, John

Knight (Oxford preacher)

Knox, John

Knyvett, Sir Thomas

La Rochelle, France

Lambe, Dr John

Lambert, General John

land: ownership under Charles II

Langport (near Bristol), battle of (1645)

Latitudinarianism (‘Latitude men’)

Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury (earlier bishop of St David’s): administers coronation oath to Charles I; supports Arminians; supports Charles I; on Church’s authority; ‘Declaration on the Articles of Religion’; appointed chancellor of Oxford University; opposition to; preaches on sixth anniversary of Charles I’s accession; and ‘Thorough’ (regime); character and appearance; in Edinburgh; Van Dyck portrait; reforms Church rites and doctrines; puritan reaction to; on Scottish defiance; Pym criticizes; and Charles I’s calling great council of peers; impeached and imprisoned; at Strafford’s execution; executed

Lauder, Sir John

Lauderdale, John Maitland, 1st duke (earlier 2nd earl) of

learning: Bacon on

Leeds: captured by royalists

Legate, Matthew

Leicester, Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of

Leicester: Charles I storms

Leighton, Alexander

Lenthall, William

Leslie, Alexander (later 1st earl of Leven)

Leslie, David (later baron Newark)

L’Estrange, Roger

levellers

Licensing Act (1662)

Lilburne, John

‘Lillibulero’ (song)

‘Little Parliament’, see under Parliament

local government: under Charles I; gentry and

Locke, John

London: plague (1603); James I rides in state through (1604); Tower’s defences strengthened; described by contemporary writers; hackney carriages; City ordered to lend £200,000 to Charles I; petitions parliament for church reformation; Suckling’s party attempts to breach; Charles I’s procession in (1641); common court elections (1641); civil disorder; Charles loses loyalty; stands against royalist forces; defences erected in civil war; royalist supports in; merchants; mob intimidates parliament; New Model Army marches on; dress and fashion; houses and furniture; Pepys on life in; Great Plague (1665); Great Fire (1666); ‘bawdy house riots’ (1668); Charles II investigates City Charter and privileges; James II returns Charter; see also Whitehall

London Gazette

Londonderry

‘London’s Defiance to Rome’ (pamphlet)

‘Long Parliament’, see under Parliament

Lord of Misrule (custom)

Lords, House of: Charles I defends Buckingham in; bishops in; differences with Commons; see also Parliament

Louis XIII, king of France: as possible ally against Spain; dislikes Buckingham; and expulsion of Henrietta Maria’s attendants from England; persecutes Huguenots; promises toleration of Protestants

Louis XIV, king of France: Cromwell makes treaty with (1655); praises Cromwell; and monarchy under Charles II; ambitions and absolutism; declares war on England (1666); defensive treaty with Dutch; Charles II’s relations with; and England in Triple Alliance; subsidies to Charles II; inactivity at battle of the Texel; makes peace with United Provinces; pays out bribes; hostility to Danby; sends money to James II; amity with James II; warns James II of prospective invasion by William of Orange

Love, Christopher

Lovelace, Richard

Love’s Triumph (masque by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson)

Lowe, Roger

Lowestoft, battle of (1665)

Lowther, Sir John

Ludlow, Edmund

Lunsford, Thomas

Lutter, battle of (1626)

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, baron; History of England

Mackintosh, James: Eminent British Statesmen

Magalotti, Lorenzo

Magdalen College, Oxford

Maidstone, John

Manchester, Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of (earlier viscount Mandeville)

Manchester: first death in civil war

Mandeville, viscount see Manchester, 2nd earl of

Mansfeld, Ernest, count of

Mantegna, Andrea: The Triumph of Caesar (painting)

Maria Anna, infanta of Spain

Marie de’ Medici, queen of France

Marlborough, Wiltshire: falls to Charles

Marlowe, Christopher

Marston Moor, battle of (1644)

Marvell, Andrew; ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.’; ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’; ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’

Mary, princess: marriage to William of Orange; designated as regent; Protestantism

Mary of Modena, wife of James II: marriage; pregnancy and birth of son; William of Orange opposes; escapes to Calais

Mary Queen of Scots

Mason, Captain

masques

Mather, Richard

Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor

Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria

May, Humphrey

Mayflower (ship)

Maynard, Joseph

maypoles: reintroduced (1660)

Mazarin, Cardinal Jules

Mead, Joseph

Meade, Revd Joseph

melancholy

Meres, Sir Thomas

Middlesex, Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of

Middleton, Thomas: A Game at Chess (play)

Militia Act (1663)

millenary petition (1603)

Milton, John; Areopagitica; The Reason of Church Government

Monck, George (later 1st duke of Albemarle): in Scotland; and dispute between army and parliament; marches into England and intervenes in parliament; and Charles II’s restoration; meets Charles II on return to England

Monmouth, James Scott, duke of: birth; claim to throne; illegitimacy; victory at Bothwell Bridge; returns to England from exile; tour of West Country; offers to act as surety to Shaftesbury; implicated in Rye House Plot; rebellion (1685); beheaded

monopolies

Monson, Henry

Monson, William

Montagu, Ralph

Montagu, Richard

Monteagle, William Parker, 4th baron

Montrose, James Graham, 5th earl (later 1st marquess) of

More, John

Morland, Sir Samuel

Muggletonians (sect)

Murray, Will

music: in James I’s reign; Pepys on

Mytens, Daniel

Nantes, Edict of: revoked (1685)

Naseby, battle of (1645)

navy see fleet (English)

Naylor, James

Nedham, Marchamont

Netherlands see Dutch Republic

Nethersole, Sir Francis

Neville, Christopher

‘new disease’ (fever)

New Model Army: Cromwell forms; Fairfax commands; character; disbandment planned; petition of complaint to Fairfax; escorts Charles I from Holmby House; recruited for service in Ireland; arrears of pay granted by parliament; dealings with Charles I; proposals to Parliament; marches on London; demands representative parliament; divided over fate of Charles I; victory in second civil war; demands death of Charles I; status after king’s death; disillusion with parliament; petition of complaint to parliament; requests commanding officer; conflict with parliament (1659); dispersed under Charles II; see also army (English)

Newburn, battle of (1640)

Newbury: first battle of (1643); second battle of (1644)

Newcastle, William Cavendish, 1st earl (later duke) of

Newcastle: surrenders to Scots (1640)

news: demand for under Charles II

newsletters

Newton, Sir Isaac; De motu corporum in gyrum

Newton, Sir John

Nicholas, Edward

nonconformists see dissenters

North, Roger

Northampton, Henry Howard, 1st earl of

Northumberland, Algernon Percy, 10th earl of

Norwich, George Goring, 1st earl of

Nottingham: Charles I raises standard in; Hutchinsons at

Oates, Titus

offices of state: holders

Oglander, Sir John

Olivares, Gaspar de Guzman, count-duke of

opera: introduced into England

optics

Ormonde, James Butler, 1st duke of

Otway, Thomas

Overbury, Sir Thomas

Oxford: parliament convened in (1626); Charles I and Henrietta Maria visit (1636); Charles I makes headquarters in; peace negotiations (February 1643); Charles I summons parliament of supporters (1644); Charles I escapes from to Worcester; Fairfax besieges; Charles II orders assembly in (1681)

Oxford University: Laud reforms; James II interferes in

Packe, Sir Christopher

Palatinate

Palmer, Sir Geoffrey

pamphleteering

Paris Garden (Southwark)

Parliament: James I opens (1604); relations with James I; and Gunpowder Plot; business under James I; reconvened and dissolved (‘Addle Parliament’, 1614); meets (1621); assembles (February 1624); powers; ‘Long’ (1640–60); Charles I first calls; debates Charles I’s finances; reconvened in Oxford (1626); criticizes Buckingham; Charles I addresses; Charles I dissolves (1626); conflict with Charles I over sovereignty; opposes unlawful imprisonment; prorogued (1628); proceedings reported; opened (1629); adjourns for eleven years (1629); nine members arrested and imprisoned; summoned and meets (‘stillborn parliament’, 1639–40); called (‘Short Parliament’, 1640); work on renovation; and Triennial Act; challenges Charles I; votes money to Scots; bill allowing staying in session until dissolution voted; rule; reassembles (October 1641); and ‘Grand Remonstrance’; popular petitions to; prepares for war against Charles I; nineteen propositions to Charles I; sets up committee of safety for military preparations; army strength in civil war; wartime strategy; assumes supreme power (1643); committee of two kingdoms (with Scots); self-denying ordinance; sends propositions to Charles I; receives Large Petition from army supporters; and army discontent; grants arrears of pay to army; accepts army’s proposals; expels eleven Presbyterian members; treats with imprisoned Charles I; ‘Rump’; decides on trial of Charles I; constitution after Charles I’s death; dissolution (1653); army’s petition of complaint to; Cromwell reforms; ‘Little’ (‘Barebone’s’); Cromwell calls and dissolves (1654–5); business under Cromwell; second protectorate; conflict with army (1659); Rump expelled; Monck orders Rump to dissolve; and Charles II’s 1660 declaration from Breda; elected 1660 (‘Convention’); meets (1661; ‘Cavalier’); anger at Charles II’s declaration of indulgence; and Charles II’s expenses; reluctance to finance second Dutch War; Charles II prorogues (1674 & 1675); opposition to royal cause; reassembles (February 1677); differences with Charles II; grants £1 million to Charles II for war against France; Charles II dissolves ‘Cavalier’ (January 1679); Charles II prorogues (1679); beginnings of party politics; dissolved (1679); and exclusion crisis; relations with James II; see also Commons, House of; elections (parliamentary); Lords, House of

Parliament Scout

Partridge, John: Calendarium Judaicum

party politics: beginnings

Peacemaker, The

Peacham, Henry: The Complete Gentleman

Pelham, Sir William

Pembroke, Philip Herbert, 4th earl of

Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd earl of

Penn, Admiral William

Pennington, Vice-Admiral Sir John

Pepys, Elizabeth

Pepys, Roger

Pepys, Samuel: on posthumous praise for Cromwell; describes Monck; on popular oath; on reintroduction of maypole; on folly of marrying pregnant women; on rainstorm after Charles II’s coronation; deplores power of bishops; on Charles II’s mistresses; on Sedley’s outrageous behaviour; diary descriptions; on Great Plague; and national shortage of money; on fall of Clarendon; on popular mistrust of Charles II; on École des Filles; develops navy

Percy, Thomas

‘Petitioners, the’

Petre, Edward, SJ

Phelips, Sir Robert

Philip III, king of Spain

Philip IV, king of Spain

Pickering, Sir Gilbert

plague: (1603); (1626); London (1685)

Player, Sir Thomas

poll tax: introduced

poor, the: increase in numbers; welfare under Charles I

Popish Plot (1678)

portents and prognostications

Porter, Endymion

Portland, Richard Weston, 1st earl of

Portsmouth, Louise de Kérouaille, duchess of

Portugal: and marriage of Catherine of Braganza to Charles II

Pory, John

preaching: style; as distributor of news

predestination: as doctrine

Presbyterians: James I’s hostility to; Charles I’s concessions to; at Westminster Assembly; differences with Independents; earl of Manchester embraces; suppress printing; Charles I negotiates with; on Church rule; plan disbandment of New Model Army; eleven members charged; hostility to army; excluded from parliament by Pride; Charles II promises support to; in Cavalier Parliament; adapt to Charles II’s regime; prepare for separate church; see also Church of Scotland

press: controlled; see also books; printing

Preston, battle of (1648)

Pride, Colonel Thomas: ‘purge’; raids beargarden

print shops and booksellers

printing: suppressed (1643)

Privy Council: legislative powers; reformed

professions

prostitution: in London

Protestant Union

Protestantism: James I embraces; and Bohemian crisis; divisions; persecuted in Europe; under threat in France; in Thirty Years War; Louis XIII grants freedom of worship; and Popish Plot; see also Huguenots

Providence Island Company

Prynne, William: puritanism; charged, sentenced and ears cut off; satirizes Eucharistic rites; prosecuted and punished with Bastwick; released and returns to London; Histriomastix

purge: as word

puritans: present millenary petition to James I; religious beliefs and practices; ordered to conform to Book of Common Prayer; under Charles I; anti-Laudian reaction; women and; clergy removed from livings (1662)

Putney: Fairfax sets up HQ at; debates (1647)

Pye, Sir Robert

Pym, John: speaks against Catholic threat; on parliamentary authority in religion; supports Scots against Charles; supports Providence Island Company; petitions Charles to make peace with Scots; leads ‘Protestant Cause’; speaks in parliament; Strafford threatens; accusations against Strafford; passes ‘root and branch’ petition; reforms; as chancellor of exchequer; speeches published; ten propositions; alarmed at Charles’ proposed visit to Scotland; as ‘King Pym’ and mastery in parliament; pledges to suppress Irish rebellion; and ‘Grand Remonstrance’; blames Charles for Irish rebellion; prepares for war at home; supports mob against bishops; character and appearance; impeachment charges against; locks doors of Commons chamber; fear of traitor’s death; raises money in civil war; rejects Essex’s proposed truce offer to Charles I; death

Quakers

Radcliffe, Sir George

Rainsborough, Thomas

Raleigh, Lady

Raleigh, Sir Walter: suspected of conspiracy; forfeits Sherborne; Prince Henry admires; sails for Guiana; executed

Ranke, Leopold von

Ranters (religious)

religion: divisions and controversies; Westminster Assembly proposes reform; enthusiasts and radicals; under Cromwell and commonwealth; under Charles II; Charles II’s declaration of indulgence on; proliferation of sects under Charles II; see also Catholics; Protestantism

Reresby, Sir John

Reynolds, John

Rhé (island, France)

Rich, Frances (née Cromwell; Oliver’s daughter)

Rich, Sir Nathaniel

Rich, Robert

Richelieu, Cardinal Armand Jean Duplessis, duc de

Ripon

Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd earl of

Roe, Sir Thomas

Rogers, Thorold

‘root and branch’ party

Rossingham, Edward

roundheads: as term; army strength; desecrate churches; weapons and equipment

Roundway Down, battle of (1643)

Rous, Francis

Rous, John

Royal Africa Company

Royal Charles (ship)

royal forests: limited

Royal Society: Bacon’s influence on; formed; Newton and; and economic improvements

royalists: pamphlets; forces muster (1642); supporters; wartime strategy; final defeats; protest at Charles I’s execution; conspiracies in London; in Cavalier Parliament (1661); see also cavaliers

Rubens, Peter Paul

‘Rump Parliament’, see under Parliament

Rupert, Prince, Count Palatine of the Rhine: commands cavalry in civil war; plunder in war; in Oxford; moves to Bristol; defeated at Marston Moor; at Naseby; surrenders Bristol; Charles I dismisses; cavalry raids from Oxford; commands fleet under Charles II

Rushworth, John

Russell, William, Lord

Rye House Plot (1683)

Sagredo, Giovanni

St John, Elizabeth

St John, Oliver

St Kitts: French occupy

St Martin (citadel, France)

St Paul’s Cathedral (old): as meeting centre; crowd destroys altar

St Winifred: shrine

Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of (earlier viscount Cranborne): and accession of James I; office under James I; informed of Gunpowder Plot; and taxation measures; and ‘great contract’; on national financial difficulties; death

Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury

Sandwich, Edward Mountague, 1st earl of

Sandys, Sir Edwin

Saye, William Fiennes, 1st viscount

science: and Royal Society

Scotland: James I visits (1617); Charles I’s relations with; opposes Charles I’s religious orders; national covenant; prepares for war against Charles I (1639); preparations for second war and advance into England (1640); negotiates with Charles I; English parliament votes £300,000 to; Charles I visits (1641); solemn league and covenant with England; volunteers support parliamentary cause in England; readiness to negotiate with Charles I; Charles I surrenders to; returns Charles I to parliament for cash; and Charles I in Isle of Wight; ‘Engagement’ with Charles; in second civil war; proclaims Charles II king; invites Charles II to visit; Cromwell’s campaign in (1650); Monck in; ordinance incorporating into commonwealth; see also Edinburgh

Scottish Church see Church of Scotland

Scroggs, William

Scrope, Philadelphia, Lady (née Carey)

Sealed Knot (royalist conspiratorial group)

Sedgemoor, battle of (1685)

Sedley, Sir Charles

self-denying ordinance

Seller, Abednego: The History of Passive Obedience

sermons; published

seven bishops: consigned to Tower and acquitted

Sexby, Edward

Seymour, Sir Francis

Seymour, William

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of: Charles II attacks; as senior councillor; as controversial figure; supports royal prerogative; on duke of York’s undependability; dismissed by Charles II; opposes Danby; urges dissolution of Cavalier Parliament; followers; objects to long suspension of parliament; sent to Tower; as champion of Protestantism; proposes dismissal of duke of York from king’s council; on election of ‘courtiers’ to parliament; appointed lord president; on Charles II’s proroguing parliament (1679); opposes James II’s accession, 4435; presents Charles II with petition for sitting of parliament; attempts prosecution of duke of York and Duchess of Portsmouth; takes refuge and dies in Holland; ‘Letter from a Person of Quality’

Shakespeare, William; The Tempest; The Winter’s Tale

Sharp, James, archbishop of St Andrews

Sheffield: poverty

Sheldon, Gilbert, archbishop of Canterbury

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Sherland, Anthony

ship-money (tax)

Shirley, James

‘Short Parliament’, see under Parliament

Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, 12th earl (later duke) of

Shrewsbury, Gilbert Talbot, 7th earl of

Sidney, Algernon

silver: minted in England for Antwerp

Sindercombe, Miles

slaves: in Pepys’s London

Slingsby, Sir Henry

soap: manufacturing monopoly

Sole Bay, battle of (1672)

solemn league and covenant; burned

Somerset, Frances Howard, countess of (earlier countess of Essex)

Somerset, Robert Carr, 1st earl of (earlier viscount Rochester): as James I’s favourite; Prince Henry disparages; infatuation with and marriage to Frances Howard; and Overbury murder; breach with James I; as lord chamberlain; draws up self-pardon; trial

Southampton, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of

Spain: peace with England; marriage arrangements for Charles I; Raleigh attacks on Orinoco; and Bohemian crisis; popular hostility to; Prince Charles visits with Buckingham; prospective war with; war with England (1625); secret treaty with England (1634); fleet in English Channel (1639); Cromwell considers alliance with; declares war on England (1655); defeated at battle of the dunes (1658)

sports: controlled under James I

Spottiswoode, John, archbishop of St Andrews

Sprat, Thomas

stagecoaches

Stamford, Henry Grey, 1st earl of

Star Chamber; abolished

Stewart, Frances

‘stillborn parliament’, see under Parliament

‘stop, the’

Stourbridge Fair

Strafford, Sir Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of: opposes illegal imprisonment; titles; as lord president of north and lord deputy of Ireland; and ‘Thorough’ (regime); letters from Laud; and Scottish defiance; returns from Ireland to advise Charles I; unpopularity; and invading Scots army (1640); Commons issue grievances against; joins Charles in London; threatens Pym and Hampden; accused of high treason; trial; Bill of Attainder against; demands for death; executed

Strode, William

Stuart, Lady Arabella

Stuart dynasty: ends (1688)

Stukeley, William

Suckling, Sir John

Suffolk, Thomas Howard, 1st earl of

Sweden: England proposes holy crusade against Catholic powers; under Gustavus Adolphus; in Triple Alliance (1668)

syphilis: spread from Naples

Tate, Zouch

taxation: under James I; under Charles I; after Charles I’s death; under Cromwell; under Charles II; see also excise; ship-money; tonnage and poundage

tea

Temple, Sir William; Memoirs

‘ten propositions’

Tenby Castle

Tenison, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury

Test Acts: (1673); (1678); James II seeks to repeal

Texel, battle of the (1673)

Tey, John

Teynham, Sir John Roper, baron

Thames, river: ‘water-pillar’ (1626)

theatre: in James I’s reign; in Restoration

Thirty Years War (1618–48): beginnings; Catholic advances; Gustavus Adolphus enters

Thirty-Nine Articles (Church of England)

Thoresby, Ralph

‘Thorough’ (principles)

Thurloe, John

‘Tom-Tell-Truth’ (writer)

Tomkins, Thomas

tonnage and poundage (tax)

Tory: as term

trained bands: raised (1642)

Tresham, Francis

Trevor, Sir John

Triennial Act (1640)

Triple Alliance (England–Dutch Republic–Sweden, 1668)

Tuke, Sir Samuel

Turner, Anne (née Norton)

Turnham Green

Twysden, Sir Roger

United Provinces see Dutch Republic

Uxbridge: peace negotiations (1645)

Van Dyck, Sir Anthony: portrays Charles I; portrays Wentworth (Strafford); portrait of Laud

Vane, Sir Henry

Venables, General Robert

Venn, John

Verney, Sir Edmund

Verney, Sir Ralph

Villiers, George see Buckingham, 1st duke of; Buckingham, 2nd duke of

Viner, Sir Robert

Wakeman, Sir George

Wales: revival of civil war

Waller, Edmund

Waller, Sir William

Wallington, Nehemiah

Walpole, Horace

Walters, Lucy

Walton, Valentine

Warton, Philip, 4th baron

Warwick, Sir Philip; Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I

Warwick, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of

Waterford, Ireland

Watkins, Daniel

Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi

Weldon, Sir Anthony

Wentworth, Thomas

West Indies: Cromwell’s venture in; parts conceded to France (1667)

Westminster Assembly

Weston, Richard see Portland, 1st earl of

Wexford, Ireland

Wharton, Philip

Wharton, Thomas

Whigs: as term; oppose James II’s rights to succession; support Shaftesbury; and Rye House Plot

White Mountain, battle of (1620)

Whitehall, Palace of; Banqueting House; Charles II occupies

Whitelocke, Bulstrode: on beginnings of civil war; on Cromwell; on starvation in Cumberland; advises Cromwell against becoming king

Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury

Wight, Isle of: Charles I in

Wightman, Edward

William, Prince of Orange (later King William III): marriage to Princess Mary; and Charles II’s proroguing of parliament (1680); Calvinism; observes situation in England during James II’s reign; invited to invade England; lands in England and advances on London; guards take up London posts

Williams, John, bishop of Lincoln

Willis, Dr Thomas

Wilson, Arthur

Wilson, Jackie (singer)

Windebank, Sir Francis

Windsor Castle: Charles I in

Winter (or Wintour), Thomas

witch trials

women: delegation demands peace in civil war; role in civil war; maltreated at Naseby; use of cosmetics under commonwealth

Wood, Anthony

Woodford, Robert

Worcester: battle of (1642); Charles I escapes to from Oxford

Wren, Sir Christopher: on Prynne; in Royal Society

Wren, Matthew, bishop of Ely

Wycherley, William: The Country Wife

York: Charles I raises forces at (1639); great council of peers meet at (1640); Charles I travels to (1642); support for Charles I; royalists capture; besieged and surrenders (1644)

York, Anne, duchess of (née Hyde)

York, James, duke of see James II, king

Also by Peter Ackroyd

Fiction

The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Chatterton

First Light

English Music

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Milton in America

The Plato Papers

The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London

The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

The Death of King Arthur

Nonfiction

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures

(edited by Thomas Wright)

London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets

Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

Thames: Sacred River

Venice: Pure City

T. S. Eliot

Dickens

Blake

The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare

Chaucer

J. M. W. Turner

Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors

Tudors: The History of England from

Henry VIII to Elizabeth I

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

REBELLION. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Ackroyd. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

First published in Great Britain under the title Civil War by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

First U.S. Edition: October 2014

eISBN 9781466855991

First eBook edition: September 2014

Peter Ackroyd

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

VOLUME IV

REVOLUTION

PAN BOOKS

Contents

List of illustrations

1. What do you think of predestination now?

2. A bull or a bear?

3. The idol of the age

4. Hay day

5. The prose of gold

6. Waiting for the day

7. The great Scriblerus

8. The Germans are coming!

9. Bubbles in the air

10. The invisible hand

11. Consuming passions

12. The What D’Ye Call It?

13. The dead ear

14. Mother Geneva

15. The pack of cards

16. What shall I do?

17. Do or die

18. The violists

19. A call for liberty

20. Here we are again!

21. The broad bottom

22. The magical machines

23. Having a tea party

24. The schoolboy

25. The steam machines

26. On a darkling plain

27. Fire and moonlight

28. The red bonnet

29. The mad kings

30. The beast and the whore

31. A Romantic tale

32. Pleasures of peace

Further reading

Index

List of illustrations

1. Ceiling of the Painted Hall, detail of King William III and Queen Mary II enthroned, c.1707–14 (© Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, UK Photo © James Brittain Bridgeman Images)

2. Portrait of Queen Anne, eighteenth century (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

3. Portrait of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, by Godfrey Kneller, seventeenth century © Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

4. The Battle of Blenheim on the 13th August 1704, c.1743 (© National Army Museum, London / acquired with assistance of National Art Collections Fund / Bridgeman Images)

5. Portrait of George I of England from the studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, c.1754 (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)

6. Portrait of George II, eighteenth century (© The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images)

7. Interior of a London coffee-house, c.1650–1750 (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

8. Portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, eighteenth century (© Philip Mould Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images)

9. Portrait of William Pitt the ‘Elder’, later 1st Earl of Chatham (Private Collection / Photo © Bonhams, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

10. Portrait of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart the ‘Old Pretender’, c.1754 (Photo by Print Collector / Getty Images)

11. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and the ‘Young Pretender’, c.1740 (Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

12. Emblematical print of the South Sea, illustration from Hogarth Restored: The Whole Works of the Celebrated William Hogarth, c.1812 (© Private Collection The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images)

13. The Spinning Jenny, invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, d.1870 (© Private Collection / Ken Welsh / Bridgeman Images)

14. A caricature of Gin Lane by William Hogarth, c.1750 (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

15. A portrait of John Dryden by John Michael Wright, c.1668 (© Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

16. A portrait of Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas, c.1718 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

17. A portrait of Alexander Pope from the studio of Godfrey Kneller, eighteenth century (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

18. A portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds, eighteenth century (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

19. King George III by Allan Ramsay, c.1762–64 (National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

20. Portrait of the Prince of Wales, late King George IV, c.1790 (Private Collection Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London Bridgeman Images)

21. The Iron Forge, c.1772 (© Broadlands Trust, Hampshire, UK / Bridgeman Images)

22. The Ball, from ‘Scenes at Bath’ by Thomas Rowlandson (© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / Bridgeman Images)

23. A teapot from the Wedgwood Factory, Staffordshire, c.1775 (© Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images)

24. An engraving of the Boston Tea Party, 16th December 1773 (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

25. A canvas of George Washington at Princeton, 1779 (© Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA / Bridgeman Images)

26. William Pitt the Younger by Thomas Gainsborough, c.1788 (© The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London, UK © Historic England Bridgeman Images)

27. The Impeachment, or ‘The Father of the Gang turned King’s Evidence’, published by S. W. Fores in 1791 (© Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / Bridgeman Images)

28. A portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, c.1804 (© Wordsworth Trust / Bridgeman Images)

29. A portrait of poet William Wordsworth, eighteenth century (© Wordsworth Trust / Bridgeman Images)

30. An etching of The Ancient of Days by William Blake, c.1794 (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

31. A watercolour of people taking the waters at the pump room, Bath, c.1784 (© Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and North East Somerset Council / Bridgeman Images)

32. The Promenade at Carlisle House, c.1781 (Private Collection / © Look and Learn Peter Jackson Collection Bridgeman Images)

33. A Modern Belle going to the Rooms at Bath, published by Hannah Humphrey in 1796 (© Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / Bridgeman Images)

34. The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball on 15 June 1815 (© The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images)

35. The Battle of Trafalgar, c.1805 (© Musée de la Marine, Paris, France J. P. Zenobel Bridgeman Images)

36. An equestrian portrait of Napoleon c.1810 (Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images)

37. The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, nineteenth century (© Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images)

1

What do you think of predestination now?

The king had fled, in the face of an invading army. Even though James II had reached the safety of France and William, prince of Orange, was ensconced in Whitehall, it was not at all clear who was the true sovereign of Britain. So a ‘Convention’, half way between an assembly of notables and a parliament, was called at the beginning of 1689.1 Since no recognized king was readily available to call an election it was a somewhat hasty and improvised affair; but it was not without the most important consequences. It marked a revolution in the affairs of state.

The Convention met towards the end of January 1689 to consider the respective positions of James and William; there was at once a conference on the meanings of a throne ‘deserted’ or ‘vacant’, a learned debate but one driven by the need to exclude for ever the absent king. The Commons finally declared that James II had ‘abdicated’, but there was no such term in law so this was essentially a legislative fiction. Yet there was no plausible alternative to the usurper’s rule. As an authoritarian Catholic, James had been the worst possible monarch for a strongly Protestant nation. The fact that a group of notables had asked William of Orange to intervene in an increasingly fraught situation had granted a measure of legitimacy to the prince’s easy conquest. Yet he could not be seen as a king by conquest; that would bring back horrid memories of William I, whom good republicans loved to hate. So he had somehow to be proclaimed as king by right, a conveniently loose description that might cover almost any set of circumstances.

By the beginning of February a ‘declaration of rights’ had been composed by the members of the Convention. One of its clauses forbade the establishment of a standing army in times of peace, regarded as one of the most obvious tokens of arbitrary royal power. Other clauses tended in the same direction. Laws could not be executed or suspended without the consent of parliament; taxes could not be raised for the benefit of the Crown without parliamentary agreement; freedom of speech in parliament was paramount and, in the final clause of the declaration, ‘parliaments ought to be held frequently’.

The Declaration, later the Bill, of Rights was formally recited to William and to his consort, Mary, daughter of the deposed king; they sat in state in the Banqueting House and, after William had affirmed that ‘we thankfully accept what you have offered us’, they were proclaimed to be conjoint sovereigns. It was a delicate juggle. It could only be assumed that William had understood and accepted the Declaration as a prelude to his crowning, as William III, but he had not been pressed to any formal oath of assent. Many now believed, however, that he had been granted sovereignty by way of parliament. The divine right of kings had come to an end. Daniel Defoe declared later that parliament had ‘an Unbounded Unlimited Reach, a kind of Infinite attends their Power’.

William’s reticence on the substance of the declaration did not necessarily imply consent. He was by no means enamoured of its principles; it was a very English production, being almost entirely non-theoretical, but he knew well enough that it circumscribed his power. He said that he had no wish to confirm some of its clauses but that ‘the condition of his affairs overruled his inclinations’; later he complained that ‘the worst of all governments was that of a king without treasure and without power’. On the day after the marquis of Halifax tendered the crown to him in the Banqueting House he told the marquis that ‘he fancied, he was like a king in a play’. But he had to maintain his part at all costs.

A combination of gentry and aristocracy had in effect formulated a settlement that eliminated the threat of royal absolutism and protected property from arbitrary seizure. They were not interested in the idea of remedial legislation by parliament for the sake of social good or some benign notion of order. They wanted the rewards for themselves only. So was crafted what became known as the ‘glorious revolution’ promoted in theory by divine providence but supervised in effect by an organized elite, an aristocracy and oligarchy bolstered by the support of the landed gentry; the members of this elite would retain their power for the next 200 years.

The new order was bitterly opposed by those who believed that former oaths of loyalty to the deposed king could not and should not be broken; if the most solemn pact could be overturned, where could proper order and authority be found? The objectors, who refused to swear a new oath of allegiance to William and Mary, became known as ‘non-jurors’. Some of the most senior clerics in the country were of their number, among them William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury. Eight bishops, and 400 clergy, adopted his stance. At the coronation of William and his consort in Westminster Abbey on 11 April, the archbishop was absent; the bishop of London raised the crown. Sancroft himself was forced into retirement in the following year.

The non-jurors were the measure of a divided kingdom; many of them became Jacobites, or supporters of the exiled James, in spirit if not in practice. It cannot be doubted that loyalty to William was distinctly muted in many parts of the country, and that he was conceived by some to be a foreign king imposed in the first place by force. Yet what could be done? The crown was on his head. Indifference, or resignation, was the inevitable response.

The Convention was converted into a parliament by the new king, with the simple expedient of delivering a speech from the throne to both houses. In his coronation oath he had consented to govern according to ‘the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same’; it was a sign of the new balance in the constitution. Yet the relationship between Crown and parliament was not necessarily happy; in a further indication of their new power the members refused to grant William a revenue for life, and failed fully to fund his approaching campaign against France. They had learnt the unhappy lesson of the former king who had been able to support himself without their aid. William was as a result wholly reliant upon frequent parliaments to service his debts. Parliament now met every year, with sessions lasting for several months; general elections were held, on average, every two years. This quickened activity of course raised the temperature of the political atmosphere, encouraging what came to be known as ‘the rage of party’.

This was not to the liking of the new king who detested fractious politicians. He did not speak good English, and was in any case reserved in nature to the point of being sullen or morose. He always longed to be back in his native land, away from the hypocrisy and importunity of the English court. He hated pomp. His manner and appearance did not necessarily recommend themselves to his new subjects. He spoke slowly and briefly. He was by nature calculating, cool and methodical. Though he was of slight frame he managed to carry himself with authority; he was an asthmatic, however, and his conversation was interrupted by a continual deep cough. He soon removed himself from the fog and damp air of Westminster to the relatively healthy ambience of Kensington. He was generally severe, or even solemn, and was rarely cheerful; only with his inner circle of Dutch advisers did he relax.

It was rumoured at the time that members of his court were homosexual and that, in particular, two of William’s ‘favourites’, the first earl of Portland and the earl of Albemarle, had been granted half a million acres of land. The wife of Philippe, duke of Orléans and the French king’s younger brother, Princess Palatine Elisabeth Charlotte, asked if the court of William had become a ‘château de derrière’. Her husband, known as ‘Monsieur’, was a notorious homosexual; so she may have acquired her information at first hand. A verse was circulated that included the lines:

Let’s pray for the good of our State and his soul

That he’s put his Roger in the right Hole.

Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury and a firm supporter of the new dispensation, remarked somewhat mysteriously that the king ‘had no vice, but of one sort, in which he was very cautious and secret’. This might have been alcohol, but it is unlikely. It is also true that intimations of homosexuality can be found in any male-dominated militaristic court, like that of William III. As in most stories of royal homosexuality, however, there is no actual evidence to support the claim.

William was, in any case, a sincere Calvinist who upheld the strictest possible interpretation of preordination. That is why he possessed a sense of destiny. He had said to Burnet, after he had landed at Torbay ready to confront James II, ‘Well, doctor, what do you think of predestination now?’ He believed himself to be fated, in particular, to lead a war against the Catholic French king. It was the great cause of his life. His faith may also have provided the context for his bravery and fearlessness in battle. Certainly it influenced his explicit toleration for those dissenters outside the Anglican fold.

One of the first measures of the new parliament was a bill to introduce and to encourage religious moderation. The Toleration Act granted freedom of public worship, and legal protection, to dissenters. Over the next twenty years more than 2,500 chapels or conventicles were licensed for worship. It seemed just and right that William should indulge the inclinations of those believers who were, after all, fellow Protestants if not fellow Calvinists. This is the setting for the Methodist revival of the 1740s, but many in the larger body of Anglicans believed that the rights of the national faith were being overlooked; certainly, by the mid-eighteenth century, the orthodox Church was beset by apathy or indifference in the face of more enthusiastic creeds.

William had declared war on France in the spring of 1689. The principal reasons for the invasion of the previous year had been his intention and desire to recruit the wealth and resources of England in his long campaign against French domination of Europe and, in particular, against French threats to the independence of the Dutch republic of which he was ‘stadtholder’ or head of state. This had been his guiding purpose for the last sixteen years. In 1672, in the face of French invasion, he had stated that he would die defending his country ‘in the last ditch’; in turn Louis XIV had described William as ‘my mortal enemy’. The French king wished to create a grandiose Bourbon empire, with himself at its head. He wanted to rule from Versailles. The sun king, or le Roi-Soleil, might rise all over Europe. If he conquered Holland, too, he would have defeated the strongest Protestant power on the continent. English ambitions were more simple. They agreed to William’s war in order to preserve themselves from the return of James II under French auspices; they did not wish to become, as it was said, ‘papists or slaves’. It was hoped that the war would be a brief one.

That hope was not fulfilled. William in effect now guided what became known as the ‘Nine Years War’ against the traditional foe; he became his own foreign minister and put together a coalition of other powers, including Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, for the attack. That ‘empire’ was in large part a loose confederation of independent princes who ruled the states of central Europe and who also feared French domination. Yet William’s war was only the prelude to a much larger and longer conflict. The war of England against France lasted for fifty-eight years and the long hostility only found its quietus at Waterloo in 1815. This prolonged culture of war changed the social, fiscal and political aspects of English life. Larger and larger armies were brought into operation. Taxes increased exponentially. This will be one of the stories of the volume.

William had already become disenchanted with his English parliament. In the spring and summer of 1689 he complained variously that ‘the Commons used him like a dog’ and that ‘he could not bear them’. The lines between the two largest parties, Whigs and Tories, had been carved in stone during the reign of James II. The Whigs were the enemies of popery and arbitrary government, and thus had attempted to limit royal power; the Tories had determined to defend the monarchy against the onslaught of those whom they considered to be republicans or rebels. Yet with the advent of William III, all had changed.

Of the ‘immortal seven’ who had invited William to land with his army in England and supplant James, five were Whigs and two were Tories. The Whigs, then, felt that they had the advantage over their opponents. In the first months of William’s rule they demanded vengeance for the indignities imposed upon them during the last king’s reign; they were also determined to guide William’s counsels. But the new king knew well enough that he could not rule with the support of only one party; he had to strive for parity and balance in national affairs, favouring neither Whigs nor Tories but governing with the assistance of both. He wished to construct a ‘court party’ from the two sides.

The Whigs were not interested. They were particularly incensed against those Tory parliamentarians who had expressed their allegiance to the court of James II. Certain noblemen were accused of treason for joining the Church of Rome. The mayors and aldermen of all the towns and cities who had surrendered their charters to the previous king were to be deprived of any office for seven years. It was even proposed that a retrospective penal law should be applied to the entire Tory party. William, however, expressed his desire for an amnesty, a bill of ‘general pardon and oblivion’ for any who had engaged in arbitrary or illegal acts in the previous reign; in the summer of 1689 an ‘Indemnity Bill’ was presented to the Commons but it got no further than a second reading and was left on the table of the house. It was effectively dead.

So as far as William was concerned, parliament had failed. It had achieved nothing to his purpose and, in addition, had not granted him the easy supplies of revenue that he desired. One further imposition antagonized him even more. He proposed to sail with an army to Ireland in order to subdue the Catholics, and the remaining followers of James II, who posed a serious threat to the security of England. But the Whigs did not want him to go. They feared for his health in a land of rain and fog. They disliked the idea of a large army of recruits and mercenaries, many of them from northern Europe, standing on British soil. Before they could act with any decision, however, William dissolved the parliament and called for fresh elections.

The campaign of March 1690 was fiercely fought. ‘Never’, Diana Paget wrote to her relative, Lord Paget, ‘was greater animosities and divisions than there is at this day, Whig and Tory more than ever.’ It was, according to Macaulay, a struggle for life or death. Sermons and pamphlets and street ballads raised the temperature; lists of parliamentary divisions were published for the first time, with the purpose of ‘informing’ the constituents about the competing members. The result in fact favoured the Tories with ‘the Church of England men’, as they were sometimes called, winning the majority. In this more amenable climate the king returned the compliment by issuing ‘an act of grace’, for the pardon of all offences committed by the followers of James II; it required only one courteous reading by Lords and Commons in May to pass into law. In the following month William sailed for Ireland with his army.

The case against Ireland was similar to that against France. In both countries the pretensions of the Stuart monarchy were upheld. In the spring of 1689 James II had landed at Kinsale, on the southwest coast of Ireland, with a body of French troops. The parliament at Dublin proclaimed him to be the lawful king and passed a bill of attainder against his rebellious enemies. So in June 1690, William was poised to strike back with artillery and a larger army. The English regiments, from Cheshire, Cumberland and elsewhere, were strengthened with German and Scandinavian mercenaries.

The state of Ireland was for the new English king vexatious. He had already sent an army, under the command of the duke of Schomberg, to subdue the hostile population and its leaders; the duke had remained on the defensive and did not risk open battle, on the good grounds that his troops were untrained and that the opposing troops of James II were at that stage the stronger. William himself was obliged to take command. He sailed from Chester with a further 16,000, carried over the Irish Sea in 280 transports.

When he landed at Carrickfergus on the north-eastern coast of Ireland, he joined with Schomberg’s forces and began the march south to Dublin; when he reached Drogheda, 35 miles north of the capital, he received the news that the enemy army was close by on the south side of the River Boyne. The Jacobite force, consisting largely of Irish Catholics, was the first line of defence for Dublin. William had feared that his Irish campaign might be hindered by a wet autumn and a frozen winter, but the opportunity for a decisive victory had come. ‘I am glad to see you, gentlemen,’ he is supposed to have remarked as he surveyed the Irish forces. ‘If you escape me now, the fault will be mine.’

On the day before the battle, 30 June, he was fired upon by two field guns, and the second ball grazed his shoulder. He bent forward over his horse’s neck for a moment, and the Irish gave out a great shout of exaltation. But he steadied himself. ‘There is no harm done,’ he said, ‘but the bullet came quite near enough.’ His wound was dressed and he prepared himself for the coming battle.

It was important quickly to force the passage over the Boyne. William led his left wing, consisting of the cavalry, while Schomberg was entrusted with the command of those on foot. The watchword was ‘Westminster’. Every soldier wore a small green bough in his hat while, on the Irish side, the men wore slivers of white paper. It was hard work for Schomberg’s men to cross the river but they pressed forward; they were resolute but they were repeatedly forced back by James’s cavalry. They resisted and regrouped, however, and the Jacobite forces were ordered to retreat. James himself had watched the battle from a distance, and at its inglorious close galloped off to the fishing village of Duncannon where he would set sail for the safety of France. He would never return to Ireland and his last, best, hope of regaining his throne had gone. The Irish, effectively abandoned by their king, called him ‘Seamus a’ chaca’ or James the Shit.

The battle of the Boyne effectively ended any chance of Catholic ascendancy in Ireland. The treaty of Limerick, signed in the following year, promised relatively generous terms to the Irish forces and to the Catholic population. But the Irish Protestants were not ready to concede so much to the religious enemy and, in the Dublin parliament, they set out their own conditions for the end of the Anglo-Irish war. These became known as ‘the penal laws’. Those who had fought for James II lost all their property. No Catholic landowner could pass on his estates intact to a single heir. Catholics could not hold office, bear arms, or openly practise their religion. They were also debarred from any legal or military profession. This became known as ‘the Protestant ascendancy’ but was called by the Irish Catholics the ‘long briseadh’ or the ‘long breaking’.

Yet English triumph in Ireland was not matched by success in the campaign against the French. The war had suffered a disastrous beginning when, in the summer of 1690, a combined Dutch and English fleet was defeated by the French navy off Beachy Head with the loss of eleven ships. The news created panic fear in London and elsewhere, since it seemed possible and even likely that the enemy might now mount a full invasion of English soil. The local militias were called up, and men armed with swords or pitchforks descended onto the Devonshire coast ready to fight any Frenchman. The silver sea, serving ‘as a moat defensive to a house’, was in the command of an ancient enemy. What if its fleet sailed up the Thames?

In the event there was no French invasion or, at least, not a serious one. A thousand Frenchmen landed at Teignmouth, where they proceeded to ransack and burn down the fishing village; but then they went back to their ships and sailed away. It was a signal warning, however, of their policy of spoliation. The lord admiral of the fleet, Arthur Herbert, first earl of Torrington, was arrested and taken to the Tower for failures of duty; at a later court martial he was acquitted, but he was shunned at William’s court and never taken into service again.

William sailed across the Irish Sea to Bristol in early September 1690, having asked John Churchill, earl of Marlborough, to share command of the continuing Irish campaign with two foreign generals; the king began a slow journey, in part a march of triumph, to his palace at Kensington. In the following month parliament voted him more than £4 million for the army and the navy in their continuing conflict with France; the money itself was to be raised by means of a newly conceived land tax and by the doubling of customs and excise, an increase in revenues that heralded the emergence of what has become known as a financial or ‘fiscal’ state. It was a gesture born out of fear as well as gratitude; the members of parliament were still alarmed at the prospect of invasion.

The king now travelled to The Hague for a congress in which he would try to organize the military strategies of his allies. With the exception of the Dutch, naturally, they proved to be fractious and unwilling. Denmark and Sweden, for example, considered themselves to be so distant from the scene of conflict that they held back; William suspected them of conniving at a peace with France which would be tantamount to surrender. The elector of Brandenburg would not go to the aid of the Spanish Netherlands. The elector of Saxony recalled his troops from what he considered to be unsatisfactory winter quarters. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, was more concerned with Turkey than with France. Yet William’s great strength lay in the arts of diplomacy; by means of bribes, promises and entreaties he managed to preserve the coalition.

These resources were never more necessary than in April 1691, when the city of Mons in the southern Netherlands, close to the border with France, fell to Louis XIV. The rejoicing at William’s discomfiture was not confined to Versailles; the Jacobites in London celebrated his defeat in the taverns and coffee-houses which they openly frequented. He had also another, and more secret, enemy. The first earl of Marlborough was not happy with his position; he had scored a notable victory in Ireland, with a campaign of five weeks in which he had taken Cork and Kinsale, thus blocking the seaways to France. Yet he resented the fact that foreign generals were preferred by the king, and that the dukes and counts of the various principalities of Europe could claim precedence over him.

Marlborough had all the makings of a modern patriot; he was handsome, clever and resourceful, an excellent general, and a politician of persuasive manner. He had distinguished himself twenty years before in the service of the duke of York, and had never since been out of favour. He had deserted his first patron, who had become James II, and had gone over to William’s party at the time of the invasion, doing so on the grounds of Protestant piety. But he seemed quite happy to reverse his allegiance once again, if the circumstances were propitious. He was inclined to support whatever and whoever indulged his interests, whether for power, money, or further honours, while all the time remaining tactful, modest and obliging.

Soon after his return from Ireland he seems to have organized or joined a plot to restore James II to the throne. He believed that he had the English army behind him. The evidence also suggests that other English grandees had made their own approaches to James, living as an exile in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in the hope of insuring themselves for any possible future. Marlborough’s plot was discovered, however, and at the beginning of 1692 he was stripped of his offices and dismissed from the court. Then, in May, he was arrested for high treason and dispatched to the Tower. It was alleged, falsely, that he had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate William. The affair became known as ‘the flower pot plot’; a forged document, implicating Marlborough, had been placed under a flower pot in the house of the bishop of Rochester.

He was released from confinement after six weeks and, in a state of partial rehabilitation, eventually returned to the court. William seems to have taken a relatively forgiving view of those grandees who still dabbled in the intrigues of the Stuart dynasty. He had a low opinion of human nature.

The king’s principal concern was with the course of the continental war which in this period manifested neither great victories nor stunning defeats. But in May 1692, a French invasion fleet of forty-four ships was sighted off the coast of northwestern France in the vicinity of Barfleur and La Hougue; its purpose was to restore James II to the throne of England. After a fierce encounter the French force scattered but the English and Dutch navies, in the course of their pursuit, managed to destroy fifteen enemy vessels. The threat of French attack was lifted.

The Dutch and English were now the masters of the sea while the French were obliged to concentrate upon the strategies of a land war. In the summer of the year, for example, the French army won a victory at Steenkerque in the southern Netherlands, when in the course of vicious fighting five English regiments were wholly destroyed. It is easy enough to list these events in simple chronology but it would need a pen of fire to draw a true portrait of the carnage. In ‘A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’ (1723), the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift notes laconically the state of contemporary warfare with ‘twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flying in the air: smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horses’ feet: flight, pursuit, victory; fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs, and wolves, and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying’. Another sea of red then covered the field. At a much later date Macaulay reports in his History of England (1848) that, after the battle of Steenkerque, ‘the next summer the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies’.

The war was no longer popular, if indeed it had ever been. It was simply ‘William’s war’ and on the king’s return, after his spring and summer campaigns on the continent, he found unrest and opposition. He had turned variously to the Whigs and to the Tories in the effort to establish a ‘court party’ wholly committed to the prosecution of the conflict; yet he began to favour the Whigs in the evident belief that the Tories were not necessarily reliable. He was right. The Tories made up a large portion of the ‘country party’ that turned its face against court and administration. It was distrustful of government, ever suspicious of a standing army and of those members of parliament who were dependent upon court favours.

Recognizable parties in a modern sense, however, did not exist. The permutations of individual members were endless. The Tories were in principle wholly in favour of the royal prerogative, now enjoyed by William III, but among them were many Jacobites who waited for the return of James II; the Whigs were supportive of William, but in theory they were always willing and eager to limit royal power. Where did the balance lie? The king preferred ‘mixed’ ministries, composed of various political elements, but in practice he was slowly drawn towards the Whigs because of their willingness to maintain the war against France; they were much more firmly opposed to the Catholicism and to the arbitrary despotism, as they saw it, of Louis XIV. Their contacts with the financiers of the City also gave them the ability to raise funds for the prosecution of the conflict, with the attendant promise of profit and interest repayments. They were William’s friends. They were led by a group of five peers who by 1695 were being called ‘the Junto’, after the Spanish word, junta, for council.

The exiled king, ensconced in his court at Saint-Germain, was still busily scheming for his restoration; he watched eagerly for any mis-step by William, and acquired supporters or spies wherever he could. The secret Jacobites of England had adopted a key sentence: ‘Box it about: it will come to my father.’ By which was meant that it was necessary to throw the country into confusion so that James might return. The partisans also adopted a limp when they entered their taverns. ‘Limp’ was made up from the initials of four names – Louis, James, Mary of Modena, and the young Prince. James, in the spring of 1693, issued a ‘declaration’ offering a free pardon to those who would not oppose his return and promising that he would abide by parliamentary government.

The position of James’s younger daughter, Anne, was a very difficult one; her problems were compounded after the death of her sister, Mary II, in 1694, when she became the only direct Stuart heir who was a staunch Protestant. It was noted that she had a better claim to the throne than her brother-in-law, William, who now made attempts to be conciliatory. In previous years William and Mary had ignored or rebuffed Anne, for a while excluding her from court altogether. In turn Anne, encouraged by Marlborough’s wife, the formidable Sarah, had ridiculed the king; in their correspondence they called him ‘Mr Caliban’ or the ‘Dutch abortion’.

Anne was suspected of Jacobite principles on the reasonable ground that she still supported the claims of her father. It was said that, on the death of her brother-in-law, she would invite James to return to his kingdom. This was not very likely; she was wholly averse to Roman Catholicism, and remembered how much damage James had wreaked upon the body politic by his insistence on Catholic emancipation. It is more probable that she herself wished to ascend the throne in order to maintain the order and stability of the Anglican cause, to which she was utterly devoted.

William had more immediate matters to consider. By the sixth year of the war he was again in urgent need of new funds, and he turned once more to the Whigs for assistance. One of the younger members of ‘the Junto’, Charles Montagu, had the requisite skills. It was he who, more than any other, changed the nature of English finance.

2

A bull or a bear?

How would it be possible to fund the hugely expensive continental war against Louis without impoverishing the country? A solution could be found. Charles Montagu, one of the lords of the treasury, still only in his early thirties, came upon a proposal advanced three years before but never implemented. It was for the establishment of a central bank, the Bank of England, that would lend money to the government on the condition that the repayment of the annual interest would be guaranteed by parliament from funds supplied by new duties on beer and other alcoholic drinks. The subscribers to the bank would thereby have the guarantee of repayment, even if this meant that the government would raise money by making further demands upon the people. This, in essence, was the beginning of what became known as ‘the national debt’.

Montagu piloted the Bank of England Act through parliament in 1694, on the understanding that he would become chancellor of the exchequer. He even pledged the considerable sum of £2,000 as his own subscription to the bank. The money for the new venture came in quickly enough. It was proposed to raise £1.2 million from wealthy subscribers, at an annual interest of 8 per cent. Such terms were tempting enough to fill the list within ten days. The king and queen were among the investors who included merchants, financiers and businessmen. It was seen to be a largely Whig enterprise, therefore, with that party closely associated with the City of London. The Tories, who represented the landed classes, considered it to be nothing more than a ‘front’ to maintain the war. Certainly it had military and political consequences. France had no such financial scheme in operation, and so was placed at a disadvantage in funding hostilities.

This has been considered to represent a financial revolution that laid the ground for steady, if not always competent, government. Parliament, in the first place, was now in supreme command of the nation’s funding; it raised the taxes that paid for the interest on the large loans. Within twenty years an annual ‘budget’ would be presented to its members. In the late seventeenth, and early eighteenth, centuries emerged a number of smaller banks, London ‘private’ banks and ‘country’ banks, which specialized in short-term credit and the forwarding of remittances. Their advances to business and public authorities helped to ease the passage of finance and of trade.

The City had been the home of credit ever since the time of the Roman occupation, but the extraordinary growth of business in the latter years of the seventeenth century convinced many contemporaries that it was a wholly new phenomenon. A Fellow of the Royal Society, John Houghton, wrote in 1694 that ‘a great many stocks have arisen since this war with France’; he added that ‘few that had money were willing it should lie idle’, and suggested that greater profits were to be recovered from sources other than those of ‘lands, houses or commodities’. The new methods became known very quickly as stock-jobbing; money might be made in the buying and selling of shares like those, for example, in the Bank of England itself. It was described by Defoe in 1724 as ‘a trade, which once bewitched the nation almost to its ruin’.

Exchange Alley, near the Royal Exchange, became the centre for these transactions. Two coffee-houses in particular, Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, were the principal resorts of financial business. An advertisement of 1695 informed the public that at Jonathan’s ‘may be bought and sold … all stocks and shares’. A broker, John Castaing, published lists of stock prices and exchange rates together with the state of the markets in Genoa, Dublin, Rotterdam and elsewhere. It was also the place where wagers were taken, on matters public or private. What will you pay me if I do not drink wine, ale or brandy before Michaelmas 1696? What are the bets that war will be declared against France before Christmas Day? A contemporary print shows several bewigged gentlemen, with tricorne hats, standing and conversing in a large room; they are wearing formal waistcoats and coats. They invested, or represented investors, in government contracts, industrial enterprises, and the stocks of the great companies even then being formed. On the wall behind them are images of a bull and a bear, and one of a lame duck. A bull was supposed to be a financial optimist, and a bear was the opposite; they no doubt represented a mixture of both parties.

Their conversations are reproduced in a play of the period. Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1717) sets a scene in Jonathan’s:

First broker: Who does any thing in the civil list lottery? Or caco [coffee beans]? Zounds, where are all the Jews this afternoon? Are you a bull or a bear today, Abraham?

Second broker: A bull, faith – but I have a good putt for next week.

The call goes out from the waiter for ‘Fresh coffee, gentlemen, fresh coffee?’ or for ‘Bohea-tea, gentlemen?’

This was a new, and for some an alarming, practice. The Tories in particular disliked the idea of a rising ‘moneyed interest’; they believed that wealth lay in the land of England, and not in financial manipulation. It was argued that those who possessed the soil were the best judges of the country’s strengths. The moneyed men were also largely established in London, a Whig stronghold, and the assorted ranks of merchants, financiers, office holders and professionals contained a large number of dissenters and nonconformists. As a rule of thumb, it was said that dissent went with money and Anglicanism with land. As long as the war lasted, and the government was in need of funds, the new rich were assured of large profits from the institutions of public credit. The land suffered in contrast, and there were fears that the market was about to collapse. In The Conduct of the Allies (1711) Jonathan Swift returned to the attack upon the Whigs by declaring that the war was being continued unnecessarily ‘to enrich usurers and stock-jobbers, and to cultivate the pernicious designs of a faction by destroying the landed interest’.

A further, but related, division arose between Whigs and Tories. Some of the latter group favoured the return of the exiled king or of his son; but if the Stuarts came back they might easily repudiate the national debt worked out by William III and his Whig supporters. The consequence would be financial chaos and ruin for the rich subscribers. It could not be allowed to happen.

The intimations of doom, on both sides, were of course misplaced. In a short period of time, beyond the hot circles of war, the common interests between the moneyed and the landed became obvious to all concerned. As Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, in the autumn of 1711, ‘the trader is fed by the product of the land, and the landed man cannot be clothed but by the skill of the trader’. The representatives of the landed and financial interests came soon enough to entertain certain common ideals of ‘the gentleman’ and of ‘gentle society’ that animated social conventions for the next 150 years; the presence of an aristocratic elite, tantalizingly within grasp, wonderfully concentrated the minds of those who aspired to it.

The stability of the financial state was enhanced by a further measure introduced by Charles Montagu. In the year after the establishment of the Bank of England he decided to restore the true worth of the silver shilling, the value of which had been undermined by clipping and adulteration. Something like 95 per cent of the currency was counterfeit or underweight. Silver had never been more base.

Montagu had enlisted the assistance of Isaac Newton; they had both been Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, but Newton had subsequently astounded the world with his explanation of the force of gravity in Principia Mathematica. In the spring of 1696 Montagu had appointed his celebrated colleague as warden of the Mint, on Tower Hill, since in the previous year Newton had composed a short treatise ‘On the Amendment of English Coins’. The new warden was in the doubly fortunate position of being both a superb theorist and a determined experimenter.

A total recoinage was to be effected, and the old impure coins were to be removed from circulation. Montagu had initiated the proposal but had left Newton to administer and organize its implementation. The exercise was in large measure a success, and within months of Newton’s appointment the Mint was issuing some £150,000 worth of silver coinage each week. The monetary standard of the country was assured. The pillars of the state were in place.

The essential nature of that state, as a result of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, was now clearly recognizable. At its apex remained the monarch, of course. William III was on the throne by the agency of ‘the divine right of Providence’, however that phrase might be interpreted. It was an ambiguous formulation for an ambiguous position. Was he king by right of conquest or by consent of parliament? And what form of ‘divine right’ could he possibly claim? He never touched for the king’s evil, for example, although his successor Anne would do so, exercising her supposedly supernatural power.

His somewhat indefinite or at least unformulated authority was maintained by the patrician class, which is to say the aristocrats who had steered the new state ever since its foundation. The upper ranks of the aristocracy numbered perhaps 200, among them the dukes, earls and other lords; they had always represented a small but confident and coherent landed elite. Wealth was essential but was not necessarily enough. Blood lineage was equally, if not more, important. A landed estate, which conferred the right to hunt, was a prerequisite. The striving members of the upper gentry would rather join them than beat them and in truth the aristocratic code, and the aristocratic ideal, would pervade the social and political life of the century. Continuity, rather than change, was the key. It was established by habitual patterns of perception and by traditional patterns of activity, as self-evident as they were unexceptionable.

This does not represent some antiquated vision of ‘old England’ but the living reality of politics and of power. Much has been written about the supposed permeability of the upper class, open to the rich and even to arrivistes, but the reality was less promising. It was a fixed principle, even as late as the reign of George III (1760–1820), that no individual engaged in trade could become a peer of the realm.

The lords were also an effective power in the Commons. The head of the family would sit in the upper chamber, while his relations and dependants would sit in the lower; Pitt the elder once described the Commons as ‘a parcel of younger brothers’. The various families in turn set up marriage alliances, thus strengthening the power of the few. They stood above perhaps 15,000 of the lower gentry who were not of noble status but who did not have to till their own soil.

For most of the members of the gentry their Church was the state Church, their Anglicanism part of their birthright. Others of course were dissenters, and a few were atheistical, but the preponderance followed the familiar path to the village church or the town church. The Anglican authorities were in the early part of the eighteenth century wholly at the service of the administration. The archbishop of Canterbury had an official seat at the privy council, while of course the bishops were an intrinsic part of the House of Lords. When Bishop Hare once mildly threatened Lord Carteret, a Whig grandee, with the possible retraction of his vote, Carteret replied, ‘If I want you, I know how to have you.’ The bishops themselves were often of noble blood, and it was considered to be a matter of congratulation that after the rule of Cromwell the grandees were back in their palaces. The Church was viewed as one of the three great professions, alongside law and the emerging science or art of medicine, so it remained an integral part of the social hierarchy.

Orthodox Anglicanism, and it is hard to envisage any other, was primarily a religion of responsibilities and duties. It was reasonable, and not dogmatic. Morality, rather than Christ the Saviour, was the guiding presence. Its liturgy and canons had remained largely unchanged since their inception in the mid-sixteenth century. Habit and indifference completed the picture. Where the parson and the landowner are in agreement, the religious and secular state reflect one another. We may perhaps agree with that enemy of all things English, Napoleon Buonaparte, who remarked that ‘I don’t see in religion the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of the social order. It ties up to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being massacred by the poor.’ If this perhaps sounds too cynical then we may turn to that most English of observers, William Hogarth, who in The Sleeping Congregation shows the effect of a universal dullness covering all. In his etching the service is dominated by royal, rather than divine, images. Spirituality has been converted into sleep.