A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second

by Charles James Fox

“Before I enter upon any other business, I think fit to say something to you. Since it hath pleated Almighty God to place me in this station, and I am now to succeed so good and gracious a king, as well as so very kind a brother, I think it fit to declare to you that I will endeavour to follow his example, and most especially in that of his great clemency and tenderness to his people. I have been reported to be a man for arbitrary power; but that is not the only story that has been made of me; and I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this government, both in Church and State, as it is now by law established. I know the principles of the Church of England are for monarchy, and the members of it have shown themselves good and loyal subjects; therefore I shall always take care to defend and support it. I know, too, that the laws of England are sufficient to make the king as great a monarch as I can wish; and as I shall never depart from the just rights and prerogatives of the crown, so I shall never invade any man’s property. I have often heretofore ventured my life in defence of this nation and I shall go as far as any man in preserving it in all its just rights and liberties.”

With this declaration the council were so highly satisfied, that they supplicated his majesty to make it public, which was accordingly done; and it is reported to have been received with unbounded applause by the greater part of the nation. Some, perhaps, there were, who did not think the boast of having ventured his life very manly, and who, considering the transactions of the last years of Charles’s reign, were not much encouraged by the promise of imitating that monarch in clemency and tenderness to his subjects. To these it might appear, that whatever there was of consolatory in the king’s disclaimer of arbitrary power and professed attachment to the laws, was totally done away, as well by the consideration of what his majesty’s notions of power and law were, as by his declaration that he would follow the example of a predecessor, whose government had not only been marked with the violation, in particular cases, of all the most sacred laws of the realm, but had latterly, by the disuse of parliaments, in defiance of the statute of the sixteenth year of his reign, stood upon a foundation radically and fundamentally illegal. To others it might occur that even the promise to the Church of England, though express with respect to the condition of it, which was no other than perfect acquiescence in what the king deemed to be the true principles of monarchy, was rather vague with regard to the nature or degree of support to which the royal speaker might conceive himself engaged. The words, although in any interpretation of them they conveyed more than he possibly ever intended to perform, did by no means express the sense which at that time, by his friends, and afterwards by his enemies, was endeavoured to be fixed on them. There was, indeed, a promise to support the establishment of the Church, and consequently the laws upon which that establishment immediately rested; but by no means an engagement to maintain all the collateral provisions which some of its more zealous members might judge necessary for its security.

But whatever doubts or difficulties might be felt, few or none were expressed. The Whigs, as a vanquished party, were either silent or not listened to, and the Tories were in a temper of mind which does not easily admit suspicion. They were not more delighted with the victory they had obtained over their adversaries, than with the additional stability which, as they vainly imagined, the accession of the new monarch was likely to give to their system. The truth is that, his religion excepted (and that objection they were sanguine enough to consider as done away by a few gracious words in favour of the Church), James was every way better suited to their purpose than his brother. They had entertained continual apprehensions, not perhaps wholly unfounded, of the late king’s returning kindness to Monmouth, the consequences of which could not easily be calculated; whereas, every occurrence that had happened, as well as every circumstance in James’s situation, seemed to make him utterly irreconcilable with the Whigs. Besides, after the reproach, as well as alarm, which the notoriety of Charles’s treacherous character must so often have caused them, the very circumstance of having at their head a prince, of whom they could with any colour hold out to their adherents that his word was to be depended upon, was in itself a matter of triumph and exultation. Accordingly, the watchword of the party was everywhere—“We have the word of a king, and a word never yet broken;” and to such a length was the spirit of adulation, or perhaps the delusion, carried, that this royal declaration was said to be a better security for the liberty and religion of the nation than any which the law could devise.

The king, though much pleased, no doubt, with the popularity which seemed to attend the commencement of his reign, as a powerful medium for establishing the system of absolute power, did not suffer himself, by any show of affection from his people, to be diverted from his design of rendering his government independent of them. To this design we must look as the mainspring of all his actions at this period; for with regard to the Roman Catholic religion, it is by no means certain that he yet thought of obtaining for it anything more than a complete toleration. With this view, therefore, he could not take a more judicious resolution than that which he had declared in his speech to the privy council, and to which he seems, at this time, to have steadfastly adhered, of making the government of his predecessor the model for his own. He therefore continued in their offices, notwithstanding the personal objections he might have to some of them, those servants of the late king, during whose administration that prince had been so successful in subduing his subjects, and eradicating almost from the minds of Englishmen every sentiment of liberty.

Even the Marquis of Halifax, who was supposed to have remonstrated against many of the late measures, and to have been busy in recommending a change of system to Charles, was continued in high employment by James, who told him that, of all his past conduct, he should remember only his behaviour upon the exclusion bill, to which that nobleman had made a zealous and distinguished opposition; a handsome expression, which has been the more noticed, as well because it is almost the single instance of this prince’s showing any disposition to forget injuries, as on account of a delicacy and propriety in the wording of it, by no means familiar to him.

Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, whom he appointed lord treasurer, was in all respects calculated to be a fit instrument for the purposes then in view. Besides being upon the worst terms with Halifax, in whom alone, of all his ministers, James was likely to find any bias in favour of popular principles, he was, both from prejudice of education, and from interest, inasmuch as he had aspired to be the head of the Tories, a great favourer of those servile principles of the Church of England which had been lately so highly extolled from the throne. His near relation to the Duchess of York might also be some recommendation, but his privity to the late pecuniary transactions between the courts of Versailles and London, and the cordiality with which he concurred in them, were by far more powerful titles to his new master’s confidence. For it must be observed of this minister, as well as of many others of his party, that his high notions, as they are frequently styled, of power, regarded only the relation between the king and his subjects, and not that in which he might stand with respect to foreign princes; so that, provided he could, by a dependence, however servile, upon Louis XIV., be placed above the control of his parliament and people at home, he considered the honour of the crown unsullied.

Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, who was continued as secretary of state, had been at one period a supporter of the exclusion bill, and had been suspected of having offered the Duchess of Portsmouth to obtain the succession to the crown for her son, the Duke of Richmond. Nay more, King James, in his “Memoirs,” charges him with having intended, just at the time of Charles’s death, to send him into a second banishment; but with regard to this last point, it appears evident to me, that many things in those “Memoirs,” relative to this earl, were written after James’s abdication, and in the greatest bitterness of spirit, when he was probably in a frame of mind to believe anything against a person by whom he conceived himself to have been basely deserted. The reappointment, therefore, of this nobleman to so important an office, is to be accounted for partly upon the general principle above-mentioned, of making the new reign a mere continuation of the former, and partly upon Sunderland’s extraordinary talents for ingratiating himself with persons in power, and persuading them that he was the fittest instrument for their purposes; a talent in which he seems to have surpassed all the intriguing statesmen of his time, or perhaps of any other.

An intimate connection with the court of Versailles being the principal engine by which the favourite project of absolute monarchy was to be effected, James, for the purpose of fixing and cementing that connection, sent for M. de Barillon, the French ambassador, the very day after his accession, and entered into the most confidential discourse with him. He explained to him his motives for intending to call a parliament, as well as his resolution to levy by authority the revenue which his predecessor had enjoyed in virtue of a grant of parliament which determined with his life. He made general professions of attachment to Louis, declared that in all affairs of importance it was his intention to consult that monarch, and apologised, upon the ground of the urgency of the case, for acting in the instance mentioned without his advice. Money was not directly mentioned, owing, perhaps, to some sense of shame upon that subject, which his brother had never experienced; but lest there should be a doubt whether that object were implied in the desire of support and protection, Rochester was directed to explain the matter more fully, and to give a more distinct interpretation of these general terms. Accordingly, that minister waited the next morning upon Barillon, and after having repeated and enlarged upon the reasons for calling a parliament, stated, as an additional argument in defence of the measure, that without it his master would become too chargeable to the French king; adding, however, that the assistance which might be expected from a parliament, did not exempt him altogether from the necessity of resorting to that prince for pecuniary aids; for that without such, he would be at the mercy of his subjects, and that upon this beginning would depend the whole fortune of the reign. If Rochester actually expressed himself as Barillon relates, the use intended to be made of parliament cannot but cause the most lively indignation, while it furnishes a complete answer to the historians who accuse the parliaments of those days of unseasonable parsimony in their grants to the Stuart kings; for the grants of the people of England were not destined, it seems, to enable their kings to oppose the power of France, or even to be independent of her, but to render the influence which Louis was resolved to preserve in this country less chargeable to him, by furnishing their quota to the support of his royal dependant.

The French ambassador sent immediately a detailed account of these conversations to his court, where, probably, they were not received with the less satisfaction on account of the request contained in them having been anticipated. Within a very few days from that in which the latter of them had passed, he was empowered to accompany the delivery of a letter from his master, with the agreeable news of having received from him bills of exchange to the amount of five hundred thousand livres, to be used in whatever manner might be convenient to the king of England’s service. The account which Barillon gives, of the manner in which this sum was received, is altogether ridiculous: the king’s eyes were full of tears, and three of his ministers, Rochester, Sunderland, and Godolphin, came severally to the French ambassador, to express the sense their master had of the obligation, in terms the most lavish. Indeed, demonstrations of gratitude from the king directly, as well as through his ministers, for this supply were such, as if they had been used by some unfortunate individual, who, with his whole family, had been saved, by the timely succour of some kind and powerful protector, from a gaol and all its horrors, would be deemed rather too strong than too weak. Barillon himself seems surprised when he relates them; but imputes them to what was probably their real cause, to the apprehensions that had been entertained (very unreasonable ones!) that the king of France might no longer choose to interfere in the affairs of England, and consequently that his support could not be relied on for the grand object of assimilating this government to his own.

If such apprehensions did exist, it is probable that they were chiefly owing to the very careless manner, to say the least, in which Louis had of late fulfilled his pecuniary engagements to Charles, so as to amount, in the opinion of the English ministers, to an actual breach of promise. But the circumstances were in some respects altered. The French king had been convinced that Charles would never call a parliament; nay, further perhaps, that if he did, he would not be trusted by one; and considering him therefore entirely in his power, acted from that principle in insolent minds which makes them fond of ill-treating and insulting those whom they have degraded to a dependence on them. But James would probably be obliged at the commencement of a new reign to call a parliament, and if well used by such a body, and abandoned by France, might give up his project of arbitrary power, and consent to govern according to the law and constitution. In such an event, Louis easily foresaw, that, instead of a useful dependent, he might find upon the throne of England a formidable enemy. Indeed, this prince and his ministers seem all along, with a sagacity that does them credit, to have foreseen, and to have justly estimated, the dangers to which they would be liable, if a cordial union should ever take place between a king of England and his parliament, and the British councils be directed by men enlightened and warmed by the genuine principles of liberty. It was therefore an object of great moment to bind the new king, as early as possible, to the system of dependency upon France; and matter of less triumph to the court of Versailles to have retained him by so moderate a fee, than to that of London to receive a sum which, though small, was thought valuable, no as an earnest of better wages and future protection.