The Popish Plot: A study in the history of the reign of Charles II

by John Pollock

CHAPTER I

THE GOVERNMENT

“The English nation are a sober people,” wrote Charles I to his abler son, “however at present infatuated.” Charles II had greater right than ever his father to believe that his subjects were mad. The appearance of Oates and the death of Godfrey heralded an outburst of feeling as monstrous as the obscure events which were its cause. From the sense of proportion they had displayed in the Civil War the English people seemed now divorced and, while they affected to judge those of “less happier lands” fickle and tempest-tossed, let the tide of insobriety mount to the point of complete abandonment. Public opinion was formed without reason. The accumulated suspicion and hatred of years swelled into an overpowering volume of tumultuous emotion. Scarcely the most sane escaped the prevailing contagion of prejudice and terror. None could tell where the spread would stop.

The times were in a ferment when Parliament met on October 21, 1678. In his speech from the throne the king gave notice to the Houses that information had been laid of a Jesuit conspiracy against his life, and he and the Lord Chancellor following promised a strict inquiry. The government wished to keep the investigation clear of Westminster, recognising the danger of parliamentary interference;[311] but the Commons were of another mind. They returned to their house, and business was begun by members of the privy council. Motions were made to take the king’s speech into consideration, for the keep of the army, and the court party tried first to turn the attention of the house to the need for money. The question was about to be put, while country members sat in amazement. Suddenly one rose to his feet and in a speech of fire brought to debate the subject that was in the mind of every man present. He admired, he said, that none of those gentlemen who had spoken nor any others of the house who held great places at court should speak one word of the Plot, though his Majesty’s life and government were exposed to manifest danger; the property, liberty, lives, and, yet dearer, the religion of all were embarked in the same bottom; that neither an army nor money, in however vast sums, could protect a prince from the knife of a villain the murder of two Kings of France testified; and was the prisoner Coleman, so inconsiderable a person, to be thought the chief agent in a design of such importance, of such deep intrigues and tortuous ways But a few days before Sir Edmund Godfrey had been done to death. Were a spaniel lost, inquiry was made in the Gazette: now a worthy gentleman had been barbarously murdered in discharge of his duty, and no search was undertaken for the criminals. The privy council, declared the speaker, was cold in its pursuit; let the great council of the land proceed with greater vigour.[312] Parliament threw itself into the case with immediate determination. Committees were appointed to consider ways and means for the preservation of the king’s person, to inquire into the Plot and Godfrey’s murder, a bill was prepared to disable papists from sitting in either house of Parliament, addresses were made for the removal of all popish recusants from London and for a day of solemn fast, which was accordingly appointed by proclamation for November 13. Oates and Bedloe were heard with their expansive tales at the bars of both houses, and on the 1st of November a joint resolution was voted that “there hath been and still is a damnable and hellish Plot, contrived and carried on by Popish Recusants, for the assassinating and murdering the King and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion.”[313]

Consternation was not expressed in debate alone. Gallant members were in alarm as well for themselves as for their sovereign. Sir Edward Rich informed the Lords’ committee of an apprehension he had for some time felt that both houses of Parliament were to be blown up. A beggar at the Great Door was arrested on suspicion that he was an Irish earl’s son. Great knocking had been heard underground in the night hours. Sir John Cotton, who owned a cellar beneath the Painted Chamber, was requested to have his coals and faggots removed from so dangerous a spot, and the Duke of Monmouth generously lent guards to stand watch until a strict examination could be made. Accompanied by the Masters of the Ordnance and an expert builder. Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Jonas Moore conducted the inspection. They reported the lower structure of the house to be in an extremely dangerous state. The walls were mostly seven feet thick and contained many secret places. Vaults ran all the way from the Thames under Westminster Hall. By the help of neighbours who owned the cellars any one could introduce a store of gunpowder within four and twenty hours. Without a guard their lordships could have no security. Orders were given for the adjoining houses and vaults to be cleared, for the cellars to be opened one into another, and sentinels to patrol them night and day under command of a trusty officer. It was even doubted whether Parliament had not better remove to Northumberland House. Still as neither knocking nor the beggar were seen to produce ill effects, nothing further was done, and Sir Edward Rich found himself derided as a lunatic.[314] Beyond Westminster the terror ran no less high. A report came to town that St. John’s College, Cambridge, had been burnt down and three priests taken with fireballs in their possession. The new prison at Clerkenwell was fired and some priests immured there hailed as the obvious incendiaries. Somerset House was searched by Lord Ossory, who was promptly said to have found a hundred thousand fireballs and hand-grenades, A poor Venetian soapmaker was thrown into prison on the charge of manufacturing similar infernal machines; but on examination his wares turned out to be merely balls of scent. Dread of fire seemed to have touched the limit when Sir William Jones sent an express from Hampstead with orders to move his store of firewood from the front to the back cellar of his house in London that it might be less near the malign hands of Jesuits. And from Flanders came the disquieting rumour that if, as was expected, the Catholics in England were destroyed in the turmoil, the burghers of Bruges had prepared the same fate for English Protestants in their town.[315]

Into the midst of so fierce a storm Charles II and his government were thus suddenly thrown. It had broken over their heads almost without warning. September had passed with a clear sky; October was not out before the elements had massed their forces against the king’s devoted servants and were threatening to overwhelm the land with a gigantic catastrophe. In August Charles had at his control a formidable army and in his pocket the sum of £800,000, with the added satisfaction of seeing removed by the general peace a fruitful opportunity for his political opponents: before December the throne on which he sat seemed tottering to its fall. The servants of the crown faced the situation with admirable fortitude. English statecraft of the Restoration period was a haphazard school. Since the fall of Clarendon integrity of dealing had ceased to be an ideal for English politicians. Common honesty, the saving grace of party principle, fled from a scene where could be witnessed the sight of offices bought and sold with cheerful frankness and votes bidden for as at an auction without shame. The king’s chief minister lent himself to a policy of which he heartily disapproved. The king’s mistresses were notable pieces in the game played at court. A quarrel between them might be expected to influence the fate of incalculable futures. General want of method reduced the public services to chaos. The salaries of ambassadors fell into long arrear; clerks in the offices of the secretaries of state petitioned vehemently for their wages; the very gentlemen waiters were forced to urge that either their diet or money in its stead should not be denied them.[316] Nevertheless the nation throve on a habit of inspired disorder. Lord Treasurer Danby increased the royal revenue wonderfully. The Stop of the Exchequer, a breach of faith which convulsed the city, scarcely sufficed to shock the national credit. The growth of trade and commerce was completely changing the aspect of England, and wealth increased rapidly. Able and painstaking men such as Sir Joseph Williamson, Sir William Temple, Henry Coventry, Sir Leoline Jenkins, and in a lesser degree Samuel Pepys and the Earl of Conway, conducted the changeful administration of affairs with industry and circumspection. Want of order did not disturb them, for they were used to none; and secretaries of state were accustomed to pursue their royal master with business in bed, at his after-dinner dose, and even to still more remote places of retreat.[317] A continual shifting of the horizon prepared them for unexpected events. Without brilliant parts they learned to confront steadily situations of difficulty and danger. That which now met them was not without precedent. It had become almost a tradition of Charles’ government to expect the worst without ceasing to hope for the best. From the Restoration onwards alarms had been frequent and a spirit of revolt, even of revolution, in the air. Venner’s insurrection and the trouble in Scotland served during the earlier years to make plain that stability was not assured, and it was not only events on the surface that denoted uneasiness. In 1673 and the following year attention was occupied by a mysterious affair, never probed to the bottom, in which Edmund Everard, later perjured as an informer at the time of the Popish Plot, was charged with a design to poison the Duke of Monmouth and other persons of quality, and himself confessed his ill intention, having apparently been tutored by some of the experts in that art who flourished across the channel; with the result that he was thrown into the Tower, and was able four years after to boast of having been the first to discover the Plot and to charge the authorities with stifling it in his person.[318] Other problems trod upon the heels of this in quick succession. Throughout the years 1675 and 1676 the government shewed anxiety lest a fresh sectarian movement was on foot. A great riot made in the former year by the London prentices drew watchful eyes upon reputed fanatics. Considerable information was collected in the provinces, and judges on circuit earned golden praise by proving their attachment in word and deed to the established church. At Worcester a man of notorious opinions stood his trial for treason, but the jury acquitted him on the ground of madness, and despite plain speaking from the bench held to their verdict. Dark hints reached the government that on the first meeting of Parliament after the long prorogation an attempt would be made to seize the king and his brother and “order all things securely.” Somewhat later Compton, Bishop of London, furnished the Lord Treasurer with particulars of conventicles held by Anabaptists and other dangerous dissenters in the city and in Southwark, amounting to the number of sixteen, and for the most part frequented by between one and three hundred persons; while from another source Danby learned that the total of a few of the London congregations rose to over four thousand souls.[319]

At the same time other adversaries of the church were not neglected. Already in the spring of 1676 report was rife of papists laying in supplies of arms, and a gentleman of Hereford was charged by a number of witnesses with having declared that, had a recent account of the king’s sickness or death continued but one day longer, the Duke of York would have been proclaimed, and rather than allow the duke to want men he would have raised a troop of horse at his own expense. Orders were sent to the deputy lieutenant of the county to keep stricter watch over the Roman Catholics of whom such tales were told.[320] Repeated proclamations against the bold and open repair to the chapels of foreign ambassadors for the purpose of hearing mass and of the maintenance by them of English priests were doubtless caused by political need, but the same reason cannot account for private directions given by the king to Secretary Coventry to obtain information as to the extent and nature of the correspondence carried on with foreign parts by Edward Coleman. Instructions were issued for his letters to be intercepted, and some dozen were seized, but among them, unfortunately for all concerned, none of high importance. Although no find was made, the fact that search should have been thought necessary denotes in the government a real sense of the working underground.[321] Shortly before, Danby had caused the bishops to make returns of the proportion of Roman Catholics and other dissenters to conformists in their several dioceses, and that from the Bishop of Winchester is preserved. Dr. Morley had been advised that the motive was a fear of the result should the laws against conventicles be fully executed, as it was suspected that the number of those to be suppressed exceeded that of the suppressors. He was delighted to reply that the fear was groundless. Out of nearly 160,000 inhabitants in the diocese of Winchester 140,000 conformed to the Church of England, and of the remainder only 968 were classed as popish recusants; while the bishop’s pious belief that the odds in favour of his side would be equally great elsewhere was confirmed by an abstract of the returns for the whole province of Canterbury setting down the complete number of papists at 11,870. Other accounts gave the number of Catholics in London alone as 30,000, and their real strength in England remains unknown; but Danby had to admit to the French ambassador, when he spoke of the alarm caused by the Duke of York’s conduct, that they did not muster in all more than twelve thousand.[322] Though he did not lose sight of Catholic movements and provided himself with detailed accounts of their less known leaders in London,[323] the Lord Treasurer clearly entertained keener fears of danger from the other side.

So corrupt and able a statesman as the Earl of Danby could not fail of being an object of attack when the panic of the Popish Plot swept over the country. The one party accused him of having contrived the whole affair to sustain his credit by a persecution of the Catholics and an increase of the army, the other of stifling it to save the Duke of York, his former patron.[324] In truth he had done neither the one nor the other. When Tonge’s information first came to hand he had regarded it carefully and wished to sift the matter with caution. As likelihood grew stronger that the doctor was a liar, Danby became cooler towards him; so cool indeed that Tonge and his associates fell into a fright for the prosperity of their future and sought help elsewhere. Yet he realised the necessity for watchfulness, and it was due to his energy that Coleman’s papers were seized.[325] This attitude was hardly changed by the meeting of Parliament. The Lord Treasurer was a consistent opponent of the French and Roman Catholic interest. His constant endeavour was to draw Charles into union with Parliament and foreign Protestant powers against the pretensions of Louis XIV, and he thought that unless the king obtained foreign aid and set himself to a regular conquest of his country this was the only way to avoid complete division and debility at home;[326] but though these were his hopes, he was ready at the very moment of urging them to support his master’s private policy abroad in a wholly contrary spirit, and so caused his own fall; for when Charles wrote to Paris for money from the French king, Danby executed his orders, thus leaving his handwriting to be produced against him. The fate that forced the Lord Treasurer to act on instructions he detested was bitter. Nevertheless he was not prepared to sacrifice office for principle. He continued to obey orders and to hold his place. Retribution fell on him. The immoral character of his conduct reaped a full reward; but it must be remembered that at a time when the king was master of his servants as well in fact as in name, there was something in Danby’s plea that the monarch’s command in matters of peace and war and foreign policy was absolute to his minister, and not open to question. Immoral or not, the danger of Danby’s course was obvious, for powerful enemies at home and abroad were eagerly waiting the moment to hurl the forerunners of prime ministers from his eminent seat.

The opportunity had at last arrived. Feared and hated by the opposition for his policy of Anglican predominance at home, by the French government as a chief supporter of Protestant resistance on the continent, by both for the army which might be used against either, Danby found himself assailed by a combination of the Whig leaders and the French ambassador. He had refused the place of secretary of state to Ralph Montagu, ambassador in Paris, and the latter was now recalled from his post by Charles owing to a discreditable intrigue he had formed with the Duchess of Cleveland, abandoned and living in France. Nor did the disgrace end there, for Montagu’s name was struck off the list of the privy council. With him he brought back to England letters written by Danby to demand subsidies from Louis. His intentions could not yet be foreseen, but the indications of public events were enough to cause the Treasurer grave anxiety. An atmosphere of plot and disturbance surrounded the court, and while information poured in, little exact evidence could be extracted from it. Money either to pay or to disband the army there was none; the fleet was equally without provision, and Parliament was tender of voting supplies lest they should be misused. The Commons had imprisoned Secretary Williamson for issuing commissions to popish recusants, and were highly incensed when on the next day Charles calmly released him: worst of all, they were preparing a bill to raise the militia of the whole kingdom without possibility of its disbandment for a period of six weeks. Danby believed that under cover of the universal excitement sinister designs against the Duke of York and himself were in the air. Many were of opinion, he wrote to Sir William Temple, that those who called for inquiry into the Plot had objects nearer their hearts that they were pursuing under its cover. Yet he was so overwhelmed with business that he hardly had time to review the situation in his mind and consider the best course to pursue.[327]

Suddenly the bolt fell as if from the blue. Danby was warned by Sir John Reresby of danger impending from Montagu’s side. He had in vain attempted to manage the ambassador’s exclusion from Parliament; Montagu was defeated at Grinstead by the Treasurer’s candidate, and narrowly won a seat for Northampton on a contested election. Had he failed he could scarcely have dared fortune, but privilege of Parliament secured him from the enmity of the powers. Roused to immediate action, the minister attempted a counterstroke. Montagu had held unauthorised communication with the papal nuncio at Paris, and Danby charged him before the council with his malpractice, swiftly sending a warrant to seize his papers. But here the adroit statesman met more than his match. In the midst of the disturbance caused to the Commons by the king’s message on the subject, Montagu quietly remarked that he believed the search a design by abstracting evidence to conceal the misconduct of a great minister of which he had knowledge. He had in fact removed the documents from his other papers and placed them in safe keeping; and on the following day they were triumphantly produced to the House as evidence of Danby’s popery, treachery, and subservience to the interests of the King of France. For Montagu had been bought by Barillon and Shaftesbury, and promised Louis XIV for a hundred thousand crowns to procure the Treasurer’s ruin within six months. At a moment when all Protestants in the realm were crying in horror at the danger threatening their religion, the spectacle was exhibited of the king’s chief minister hurled from power by the French ambassador in conjunction with the leaders of the Protestant party for his too powerful support of the Protestant cause and the Anglican constitution. The man who had reorganised the royal finance, and had persistently advocated a national policy in the cause of English commerce and the English crown, vanished from the scene, accused of treachery to all three and under the stigma of having robbed his master and left twenty-two shillings and ten pence in an exchequer which, after payment for a vast addition to the navy, was actually stocked with over a hundred thousand pounds.[328] Charged with plotting, the Treasurer was himself the victim of a plot as base and planned by men as unscrupulous as are known to the annals of English politics. The rest of the story is thrice-told; how Danby was impeached and defended himself, pardoned and raised to a marquisate, how he lay hid in Whitehall while the bill of attainder was being passed, how he saved his head by surrendering four days before the attaint had force, and passed from the intrigues of the Popish Plot to an imprisonment of five years in the Tower, whence he was released in the day of his master’s triumph. Many years after, when Danby published his letters, he took occasion to prove himself no less unscrupulous than his enemies by judiciously altering the words, “I approve of this letter,” which stood in the king’s writing at the foot of the most incriminating sheet, to those which in their yet more exonerating form have become famous; “This letter is writ by my order—C. R.” Meanwhile his opponents triumphed, and Montagu was even successful in obtaining from the French king as much as half the reward promised for his perfidy.[329]

The fall of the Lord Treasurer swelled the difficulties of the government without disconcerting its policy. Though the opposition could score so great a success, there was no thought of giving up the main issue. The scheme of the militia bill was struck to the ground, for Charles declared that he would not comply with it for so much as the space of half an hour; he had not forgotten that the home forces might be used against other than foreign enemies. The Whig party was inspired with rage. Ten days before it had met with a still more serious rebuff. On November 20 the bill disabling Roman Catholics from sitting in Parliament was passed by the Lords, but with a proviso excepting the Duke of York by name from its action. James had won his point only by tears and incredible exertion, and the opposition expected confidently to throw the proviso out in the Commons. A furious debate took place. Supporters of the duke were assailed with cries of “Coleman’s letters! Coleman’s letters!” High words were bandied across the floor of the House, and Sir Jonathan Trelawny, on the court side, was committed to the Tower for boxing the ears of Mr. Ash, a country member, and calling him a rascal. Yet to the bitter disappointment of its opponents the government was successful, and the saving clause passed by a majority of two votes. The French ambassador thought that James could have hardly escaped from a greater danger.[330] Another was already looming darkly against him out of the cloudy future. Early in the session of Parliament Shaftesbury, supported by Halifax, Essex, and Barlow, now Bishop of London, had demanded the Duke of York’s dismissal from the king’s presence and counsels. Lord Russell moved an address to the same effect in the Commons. In the debate which followed Sacheverell, acting on the report of Coleman’s examination that he had himself drawn up, gave the first direct hint of the memorable project of the Exclusion bill. Might not the king and Parliament, he asked, dispose of the succession to the crown of England?[331] The idea struck immediate root. It was the obvious point to which all that had gone before tended. The exclusion of James was to be the touchstone of English politics for two years, and the lines on which parties were to be divided by it showed themselves at once. King Charles did not delay to make his view of the situation plain. He told Danby in private that he would not object to pare the nails of a popish successor, but that nothing should induce him to see his brother’s right suffer injury; and with more dignified language and thanks for the care manifested for his personal safety informed Parliament of his readiness to join in all possible ways and means to establish the Protestant religion in firm security. Subjects might be assured that he would assent to any bills presented to safeguard them during the reign of his successor, with this ominous condition only, that none should diminish the just powers of the throne or tend to impeach the right of succession and the descent of the crown in the true line.[332] On the other side the Whig lords, with whom Halifax was still at this time allied, had adopted the notion and persuaded Barillon that an attack upon the duke was the best way to attain his end. The ambassador was not wholly convinced but, since the resistance he could make to their plan would be useless, went the way of his friends and lent them judicious assistance. At least the Frenchman’s policy proved successful. His objects were to overthrow Danby and force Charles to disband the army which might perhaps be used against France. Danby fell; and on the very day when the warrant was sent to seize Montagu’s papers, the Commons voted a supply for the purpose of paying off all the troops raised in the course of the preceding year. A month later, as a last attempt to save his minister, Charles dissolved the Cavalier Parliament after an unbroken existence of eighteen years.

The elections for the new parliament were fought amid intense excitement and with peculiar energy. Both parties exerted their utmost powers to gain the day. The contest was the sole subject of conversation. Purse and pen and all other imaginable means of influence were employed without stint to elevate the intelligence and debase the morals of the electors of England. At this time began the ingenious practice of splitting freeholds to multiply votes. Under the guidance of Shaftesbury pamphlets urging the Exclusion as the only means of safety for the nation flooded the country. Lord Russell, one of the most honest of his party, was elected for two counties. Drunkenness and bribery were everywhere notorious. At Norwich “a strange consumption of beer” was noted by Sir Thomas Browne. Sir William Waller, a magistrate famed for his success in priest-hunting, won a seat at Westminster at no less a cost, as those on his own side reported, than of a thousand pounds. At the Bedfordshire polls the same interest carried the day for six times that sum. Everywhere the Whigs were victorious. When the result came to be known, it was found that the government could rely upon a mere handful of twenty or thirty votes in the new parliament as against a hundred and fifty in the old.[333]

Notwithstanding the disastrous complexion of affairs Charles began the session on March 6, 1679 with considerable success. Outside the circle of politicians the chief cause of alarm to the nation was the continued existence of the army. The king had decided to remove the ground of fear by undertaking the actual disbandment of his troops. To this end he demanded from the Commons the accomplishment of the offer made by the last parliament. On April 16 a supply of over £206,000 was voted and appropriated for the purpose, and the disbandment began at once.[334] Before many months had passed a source of apparent strength and real weakness to the government was thus removed. Accusations of arbitrary rule lost much of their force; for those who now indulged in the charge were not only open to the retort, which could be levelled at them before, that their insistance was insincere, but found themselves in a far less good position to reply. It was perhaps with more personal pleasure that Charles defeated the Commons in an altercation that took place at the opening of Parliament over their choice of a Speaker, Edward Seymour, a wealthy and profligate Devonshire landowner, who had served in the chair in the late House of Commons, was noted for an able opponent of the court and in particular of Lord Danby. The government determined to effect a change, and named for Speaker Sir Thomas Meres, a member of the Whig party, as less likely to give offence than one from the court side. The Commons however elected Seymour again, and he, having wind of the king’s intention to grant the formal request made by all Speakers to be relieved of their dignity, on his presentation omitted the customary words; but the Lord Chancellor replied for Charles that he could not allow such talent to be wasted on the post, having other employment for him, and sent Seymour and the rest of the Commons back to choose another. High was the indignation of the House, which sat for a whole week headless, combative, and remonstrating. One ardent member declared: “This is gagging the Commons of England and, like an Italian revenge, damning the soul first, then killing the body.” A representation was made to the king, protesting that his action was without precedent and the Commons only within their rights, and a second to justify the first, which Charles had told them was mere waste of time. In answer the king prorogued Parliament for two days. When it again assembled, the matter was allowed to drop. Neither Seymour nor Meres was proposed, but Serjeant Gregory, of a more neutral disposition, who was elected and approved without difficulty.[335] Though the Commons professed to be satisfied, since they had established their right to a free choice, the honours lay in reality with Charles, who had successfully rejected a freely chosen candidate objectionable to himself.

The beginning of the parliament was prophetic of what was to come. At the time no cause could seem lower than that of the court. The Whigs had swept the country at the elections. Everything at Whitehall, at the exchequer, in the services, was in disorder and disrepair. The royal household still clamoured for unpaid wages. The whole nation was in a ferment. Men’s minds were painfully divided by the project of exclusion. Innumerable cabals, intriguing one against another, troubled the surface of politics and clouded the depths. No one could tell what designs and what dangers any moment might bring forth. Above all no one could gauge the king’s intentions. Uncertainty reigned everywhere, and it seemed as if the opposing forces had but to make one push and thrust aside the resistance of government, order England as they would, and reign in peace.[336] A somewhat different light is shed by after events on “the very melancholy aspect” which Sir John Reresby noted in the kingdom. In spite of the clamour raised on all sides against feebleness and irresolution, the government had marshalled its strength with some adroitness. Danby was in the Tower. The army was in the act of being disbanded. The treasury was put into commission, and the Earl of Essex, whose austerity and popular sympathies could not but inspire some measure of confidence, named as first commissioner. Before Parliament assembled the Duke of York at his brother’s command had left the kingdom, and was watching events with wrath and foreboding, but with little influence, from across the Channel. Nothing that could betoken a conciliatory spirit in the court had been omitted. There followed a move still more important as a check to the unbridled Commons. The committee of secrecy had just been instructed to consider methods of impeachment of the five Popish lords, when on April 21 the king announced to Parliament that he had chosen a new privy council. The scheme he went on to outline, though attributed at the time to divers other heads, had its origin in the elegant fancy of Sir William Temple.[337] That excellent ambassador and gardener, returning from a mission to the Hague, found the turbulence of the state and the dangers surrounding the king such that he promptly set to considering how he might devise some advantage to his master’s service. Diplomatic experience and a natural bent to theoretical statesmanship were more prominent in his mind than knowledge of the practical expedients which must temper the keenness of political ideas in action. He saw Parliament daily encroaching, as it seemed to him, on the royal prerogative; he saw the king drawing apart from his people; he feared an open rupture which might throw the state into convulsion. On these considerations he evolved the notion of a third authority, which, standing midway between the two, should act at the same time as a cushion and as a link. The instrument he found in the privy council. By reducing the number from fifty to thirty Temple hoped that business would be discussed by the whole board, cabals and secret understandings avoided. Members were no longer to be of one party only, or allied in ambition; on the contrary, fifteen places should go to officers of state, fifteen to popular leaders from both houses of Parliament; and since he observed authority to follow land, Temple arranged that the total income of the several members should amount to £300,000, a sum to be compared not unfavourably with that of the House of Commons, which was estimated at a third as much again. By such a council the king’s policy would be ably regulated. Its composition would give confidence even to the most hostile parliament. Neither by Parliament nor by king could its authority be lightly disregarded. In the event of a breach between the two the council would be rich enough to assist the finances of the state. At the same time the king could be certain, by means of the votes of his fifteen officers, that he would not be forced to act against his own interests. The project won instant approval. Essex considered that it pointed a return to the happy days of the Restoration; Lord Sunderland, now secretary of state in place of Sir Joseph Williamson, was favourably impressed; the Lord Chancellor declared it was as a thing from heaven fallen into his majesty’s breast. The Chancellor’s remark had an unwitting point. Though the scheme was of Temple’s conception, Charles made it his own by a characteristic touch. He consented to the inclusion of Halifax in the new council only after some pressure, for he disliked and perhaps feared the great Trimmer. It was therefore with amazement that his advisers heard the king name Lord Shaftesbury. Still more amazing, Charles positively insisted on the earl’s inclusion as an extraordinary member of the council and its president. Temple was compelled to submit, not without protest. It was an act which should have given pause to optimists. None the less the news of the scheme was hailed with general applause. Bonfires were lighted in the city, the East India Company’s stock rose rapidly, Barillon did not conceal his mortification, and the Dutch republic marked the occasion by the appointment of one of its most able ministers as ambassador to St. James’; only the House of Commons viewed the matter in an unexpected light and with dissatisfaction. While the French feared a bond of union between the hostile parties in England and old Cavaliers that the king had delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, the Whigs held sullenly aloof from rejoicing, or proclaimed that they were being led into a trap. The Earl of Essex had already lost credit with his friends by serving on the commission for the treasury, and those of the party who took places on the council found that glances were cast askance at them as betrayers of their trust.[338]

To most eyes the situation as affected by the change of council was far from clear. The king himself held the key to it. Whether or no Temple’s scheme was really practicable, Charles did not intend to try. He had gained a point by dissolving his old council, which was filled with friends of Danby.[339] Another and a greater advantage was that signified by the choice of Shaftesbury as president of the new. His friends thought the king guilty of a lamentable piece of feebleness. Had the council been meant to consult it would perhaps have been so. But this was far from Charles’ design. “God’s fish!” he said to an intimate, “they have put a set of men about me, but they shall know nothing, and this keep to yourself.” Evidently the diplomatic constitution had no grand future before it. And so it proved. Within a short time the author was actively disregarding his own principle by forming one of a cabinet of four with Sunderland, Essex, and Halifax, to arrange matters before they came before the council and Parliament; while Charles, as good as his word, kept his own counsel and acted without the advice either of them or of the board at large, on one notable occasion against its will and to the great displeasure of the popular members. In Parliament the Whig councillors continued their opposition as fiercely as ever, but at the council board they had little influence. The position rapidly became impossible. It can hardly be doubted that this was Charles’ exact intention. He had achieved a double success. He had seemed to give the Whig leaders a chance of reforming the government, while in fact he had only driven them to greater exasperation. In the eyes of the nation he had offered a compromise, secure in the knowledge that it would not be accepted. The trick which the Commons feared had been played to a nicety. For this their chiefs had only to thank themselves. Had they acted on their suspicion and refused places on the council, their conduct would in this have been faultless. But the bait was too tempting to be rejected. They accepted the offer of office, intending from this new post of vantage to pursue their old plans. Their duplicity gained nothing. The king had provided for the result, and their failure could only seem due to the deceit and intolerance with which they had repulsed his good intentions. On October 15, 1679 Shaftesbury was dismissed from the council in consequence of his agitation against the Duke of York, and three months later Russell, Cavendish, Capel, and Powle, his four most prominent allies on the board, tendered their resignation by his advice. Charles accepted it in the words, “With all my heart.” The famous scheme was thus finally abandoned. Temple withdrew from politics to his garden and his library. Essex quitted the treasury and openly joined the opposition. Only Halifax, after retirement to the country, remained in the king’s service.[340]

Meanwhile the tide in Parliament ran high against the government. The new constitution had hardly begun its career before the Commons on April 27 settled to consider how they might best preserve his Majesty’s person from the attacks of papists. Impotent attempts made by members in the court interest to divert the debate only increased its keenness, and the House passed from stage to stage of fiery enthusiasm until on Mr. Hampden’s motion it was unanimously declared that “the Duke of York being a papist and the hopes of his coming such to the crown have given the greatest countenance and encouragement to the present conspiracies and designs of papists against the king and the Protestant religion.” With the addition that James had been the unwilling cause of the Plot, the House of Lords adopted the motion as it stood. This was the prelude to the piece to come. On Sunday, May 11, when daylight had gone out with talk, a resolution was carried, those against it refusing to have their votes taken, “that a bill be brought in to disable the Duke of York to inherit the Imperial Crown of this realm.” It was followed by the ferocious declaration of the Commons that they would stand by his Majesty with their lives and fortunes and, should he come to any violent death (which God forbid!), revenge it to the utmost upon the Roman Catholics. Four days later the Exclusion bill was introduced and read for the first time. On May 21 it passed the second reading and was committed. The threatening aspect of these events could not be mistaken. The Commons were fierce and pertinacious. Danby’s discomfiture was followed by an attack on Lauderdale and by another, still more violent, on the system of secret service money. “Extraordinary heats” broke out on the question whether bishops had or having should retain their right to sit in judgment upon peers arraigned on a capital charge, for the trial of the five Popish lords was expected, and the strength of the spiritual peers was a matter of grave consideration to those who hoped for an adverse verdict. Many were the indecencies, records Burnet, that arose on this occasion both in town and in country. Shaftesbury was expecting an easy triumph. Suddenly all came to an end. The king had information that the common council of the city was about to offer public assistance to the Commons in their efforts for the preservation of the Protestant faith, and that an inflammatory remonstrance on the subject of the Plot lay ready for presentation in the House. His mind was made up. With the cheerfulness characteristic of him he seemed to be thinking of nothing, when on May 26 he summoned the Commons to his presence and without warning declared a prorogation of three months. Eight weeks later Charles dissolved the Little Parliament of Westminster against the advice of almost the whole of his council. The blow fell with crushing effect upon the Whig party. Shaftesbury swore openly that he would have the heads of those who had counselled it.[341] Yet this uproarious session produced one good thing. Before proroguing Parliament the king gave his assent to the Habeas Corpus Act, its solitary record on the statute book. How near that sheet was to being blank may be told by the fact that this measure, of weighty importance in the history of England, only passed its third reading in the House of Lords because the Whig teller in joke counted one very fat lord as ten.[342]

Neither Parliament nor the privy council as a whole can properly be said at this time to have been the government of the country. Under the old system the council was a large and chiefly honorary body, the business of which was regularly transacted by a few of its members. By Sir William Temple’s construction it became a miniature of the House of Commons as in the days when the government could count upon about half the votes with an occasional majority. Though those who carried on affairs might be privy councillors, there were also many councillors who made it their chief business to prevent them from doing so. The parliament of 1679 was still less to be classed with the government than its predecessor. Here the Commons hardly disguised an overmastering wish to obstruct the administration by others until it fell wholly into their own hands, and to force on the government a policy framed in the country and strongly disapproved at court. The humour of the Commons seemed to infect the Lords also. The alarm and activity of the upper house throughout the panic of the Plot almost equalled those of the Commons; and it was by great exertion alone that the court could carry the day even when the gravest interests were at stake. The English state presented at the moment a striking appearance. Since the beginning of the modern world government in England has been with scant exception by consent, not only in the sense that in every case force is ultimately on the side of the governed, but by virtue of the fact that the English government has had nothing on which to rely but the consent of the nation. Two famous examples had already shown how hard of execution other methods must be. Mutual agreement between parts of the frame was necessary to its usefulness. But now it seemed as if this was no more. Variance had sprung up and silently grown until it became direct opposition. Government and governed were divided by an openly contrary spirit. It was a question how far Charles’ government could allow the division to widen without being engulfed in it. On the one side were ranged the forcible and callous statesmen who had organised the country party in the old Cavalier Parliament and transformed its soul to Whiggism; the country gentlemen, formerly staunchest adherents of the government, the class from whom now its keen opponents were drawn; religious dissenters; high-principled republicans; malcontents of every kind; the squirearchy, the magistracy, the Church of England.[343] On the other there met this formidable array a mere handful of men, dependents of the court or trained officials zealous to perform their duty and to uphold the traditions of English politics. The government was formed of the king and his servants, chief among them the secretaries of state. Apart from these support for the king’s policy was meagre indeed.

The work which fell on the secretaries’ shoulders was immense. Throughout the winter which followed Oates’ revelations a perpetual stream of reports, warnings, informations poured into their offices. From all quarters came disturbing news. Alarms of armed men exercising in bands at night were constant. Spanish forces were said to have landed in Ireland and the French in Scotland. Tynemouth Castle was reported blown up by gunpowder. Five thousand Spaniards were in Wales. A combined French and Spanish fleet was only prevented by a storm from landing at Milford Haven. The king’s ships at Chatham and elsewhere were to be burnt and thus facilitate the passage of troops from Dunkirk, while Hull and other seaports were ready to receive the invaders. Gentlemen rode up from Yorkshire with wild tales of “the crack and noise” in those parts, and in the West Riding the militia was called out against imaginary foes. Vast fears came from Cheshire of strange persons and a private post, denoting no good intentions. An English doctor wrote from Amsterdam telling how he had overheard conspirators planning the king’s destruction for the month of April, and had barely escaped being murdered for his indiscretion.[344] All this and a vast mass of the same description demanded instant attention, decision, and answer. Frivolous accusations against reputed papists and plotters were innumerable. A well-wisher sent from Vienna as a present to the king an antidote of astonishing excellence against possible poisons. A still more ingenious correspondent forwarded a scheme to turn the tables on the pope by “assaulting the city of Rome on that side where the Vatican palace stands and bringing away the library.”[345] In Ireland, where the Duke of Ormonde’s sober government preserved admirable order, long reports were drawn up for the instruction of the secretaries at Whitehall, and these too had to be perused.[346] London alone, apart from the turmoil caused by Godfrey’s death, provided heavy work. Order had to be taken for safeguarding the palace; twenty doors leading into St. James’ Park were blocked and a sewer grated. Protestants and Catholics posted mutual accusations to Whitehall until the secretaries were at their wits’ end how to deal with them. On the prorogation of Parliament in May, bills were distributed urging the prentices to take arms and demand the trial of the lords in the Tower. The guards at the palace were doubled, strong watches posted, and every precaution taken. A few weeks before it had been thought necessary to send two companies of dragoons to Portsmouth,[347] The whole country seemed on the verge of insurrection. In December Charles thought he saw signs of a rebellion brewing. A few months later Danby drew up a memorandum in the Tower which clearly shewed that he was of the same opinion. He suggested that the king should take up his residence out of London and call Parliament to meet him away from the capital, the stronghold of his opponents’ power. Touch should be kept with the troops disbanded. All who had served against the king in the Civil War could be forced to register their names. The navy might be officered by men who would have influence on the sailors. Lastly and most significant, the Tower should be secured.[348]

Such and so multifarious were the doings of members of the government. Yet they were members only. The head was the king’s, the policy his, and to him its ultimate failure or success must be ascribed.