A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. III

by François Guizot

The threatened Catholics were destined to pay for that check to national and Protestant anxieties. Several small plots, fictitious or real, were discovered; but the ordinary tribunals seemed weary of condemnations. It was the House of Lords itself which pronounced the sentence against Lord Stafford, youngest son of the old Earl of Arundel, and consequently uncle of the Duke of Norfolk. "He was a weak, but a fair-conditioned man," says Burnet. Titus Oates and one of his compeers, named Turbervil, accused Lord Stafford of having plotted the assassination of the king. The charge had not a shadow of foundation; the viscount was nevertheless condemned by 55 voices against 31. The royal favor exempted him from the odious punishment of traitors. Charles II. was convinced of the innocence of the victims; he had too much sense to believe in the existence of those plots incessantly arising which so alarmed England, but his cold selfishness troubled itself little with the warrants which he signed, or the lives which he sacrificed to his repose. "The king appeared very calm, and his mind very cheerful," wrote Algernon Sidney, "although one might then have thought that he would be overwhelmed with cares, having no other resource but to dissolve Parliament, and trust himself to the good pleasure of his subjects; but the embarrassment in which he was did not seem to trouble him."

A renewed attempt in the House of Commons in favor of the Exclusion Bill led to the dissolution foreseen by Algernon Sidney; and it was a token of the royal intentions that the new Parliament was convened for the 21St of March, 1681, not at Westminster, but at Oxford. Charles had concluded with Louis XIV. a new treaty, kept profoundly secret, by which the king of France engaged himself to give for the current year a subsidy of two million livres, which was to be reduced to fifteen hundred thousand during the three following years. At this price Charles broke the alliance which he had contracted with Spain for the maintenance of the treaty of Nimeguen. He returned to his dependence upon Louis XIV.

The violence of Shaftesbury and his adherents went on increasing; it passed the bounds of the national temperament. The sentiments of passionate loyalty which had hailed the Restoration were not completely extinguished, and when the leader of the Whigs, arriving armed at Oxford, affixed to the hats of his domestics the motto from one of his speeches, "No Popery! no slavery!" the echo which it occasioned in the hearts of the people was not powerful enough to sustain him in his audacious designs. The nation rejected, as he did, Popery and slavery; but it was not yet disposed to attribute to its king all the sinister views which Shaftesbury laid to his account. In the last Parliament Shaftesbury had proposed to deprive the Duke of York, upon his accession to the throne, of the power to treat with foreign governments, and to nominate civil and military functionaries. At Oxford he offered to leave to the heir-apparent the empty title of king, while entrusting the power to the Prince of Orange as the representative of the Princess Mary. These various expedients, more specious and ingenious than practicable, were insufficient to satisfy the violent passions excited in the House of Commons. The proposition of Halifax was rejected. On the 26th of March, a new Exclusion Bill was presented and carried. "On the 28th," says Burnet, "very suddenly and not very decently, the king came to the House of Lords, the crown being carried between his feet in a sedan. And he put on his robes in haste, without any previous notice, and called up the Commons, and dissolved Parliament." This was the fifth Parliament dissolved by King Charles II. The Parliament of Oxford was the last which was convoked during his reign.

He hastened, however, to reassure the nation, and to explain the motives of his actions. A royal manifesto was immediately published, complaining of the undutiful behavior of the three last Parliaments towards him, and of their disrespectful conduct in many instances. "Nothing, however," he added, "shall ever alter my affection to the Protestant religion as established by law, nor my love to Parliament, for I will still have frequent Parliaments." The Whigs replied to the royal protestations, insisting upon the necessity of the exclusion of the Duke of York; but their passions had blinded them regarding the state of public opinion. A mass of addresses were presented to the throne, some ardently Protestant, but assuring the king of their fidelity and confidence; others asserting the right of the regular succession to the throne, while a considerable number openly accepted the doctrine of non-resistance, and absolute submission to the will of the king. The country gentlemen and the inhabitants of towns scented in the air the spirit of 1641; the remembrance of the Civil War had not yet faded from men's minds; the king found himself once more supported by the national sentiment; and he believed himself powerful enough to employ it against his enemies. Proceedings were taken against the men who had insulted the royal majesty. Fitzharris had written a seditious pamphlet. College was accused of having endeavored to corrupt the king's guard; both were condemned and executed. Lord Shaftesbury, indicted as a suborner of false witnesses, was sent to the Tower. The sheriffs of London were still Whigs; the Grand Jury chosen by them triumphantly acquitted Shaftesbury. The wretches previously concerned in the proceedings against the Catholics reappeared in the proceedings against the Whigs. Lord Howard, arrested for the moment, owed his liberty to the Habeas Corpus Act. The king determined to release himself from the trammels imposed upon him by the opinions of the magistrates of London. By a movement of doubtful legality, it was contrived to have sheriffs elected who belonged to the Tory party; the latter, in their turn, chose juries devoted to them. Certain Whig magistrates were sued, and condemned in enormous damages. The king prepared his measures against the charters of the city, and the municipal liberties which everywhere protected the corporations of towns. A visit of the Prince of Orange did not suffice to arrest the absolutist reaction. "The Whigs seem to me in a majority," said the prince to the king, his uncle. "You see only them," replied Charles.

The Duke of York reappeared in London. During his absence from the court, he had exercised in Scotland a harsh and perfidious authority. The rigor to which the Nonconformists had been subjected had excited the hot-headed. A preacher named Cameron, a name still remembered among his partisans, had raised the banner of revolt against a king faithless to the Protestant religion and the government to which he had sworn. He was killed in an engagement. His successor, Donald Cargill, was arrested and soon afterwards executed with a large number of his disciples. Men and women walked to the scaffold singing songs of triumph. The Scotch Parliament instituted an oath of submission to the royal authority, which went so far as to require passive obedience. Fletcher of Saltoun and Lord Stair demanded the insertion of a clause for the protection of the Protestant religion. The Duke of York would not sanction it under this form. When it was proposed to dispense with it, Lord Belhaven declared that the utility of the oath was to exclude Papists from the succession; he was sent to prison. The Earl of Argyll, son of him who had been executed at the commencement of the reign, made some reservation in taking the oath of submission; he was arrested in his turn. The Duke of York disclaimed on his part any sinister intention towards him. "God forbid that the life and fortune of the earl should be imperilled," he said. Yet on the 12th of December, Argyll was condemned by a jury presided over by the Marquis of Montrose. He was assured of the royal pardon; but the earl put no faith in the protestation of his enemies. The Duke of York refused to grant him an audience. Argyll escaped, disguised in the attire of the page of his daughter-in-law. Lady Sophia Lindsay. Condemned, per contumaciam, to all the horrors of the punishment of traitors, his property had been confiscated, and his children declared unworthy of their inheritance; but the king, more considerate and wiser than his advisers, returned a part of his fortune to Lord Lome, the eldest son of the earl. The latter prudently remained in Holland.

The Duke of Monmouth did not act with the same wisdom. When he found the Duke of York established at the court, recognized again as Lord High Admiral and lodged by the king in St. James's Palace, he regarded as void the promise he had given to remain on the Continent so long as his rival should govern in Scotland, and returning to London without the king's permission, was received with exclamations of joy by the people. Leaving the city with a cortege almost regal, he journeyed slowly through the kingdom, received by the gentry and by deputations from the towns, mixing with the crowd wherever he went with a proud but amicable and popular condescension, and saluted on the road by the enthusiastic cries of "Monmouth! Monmouth!"

This triumphant progress led the imprudent young man as far as Chester. The chief justice of that city was George Jeffreys, already known for his violence, his ability, and his unscrupulousness in the furtherance of his unbridled ambition. Corruptly attached at that time to the interests of the Duke of York, he easily found a pretext for arresting the Duke of Monmouth at Stafford, June, 1682. On being conducted to London, the duke was immediately liberated, but was held to bail.

Shaftesbury did not put his trust in the Habeas Corpus Act. Alarmed by the measures which he saw in progress against the Whigs, he sought refuge in the city. It was an old saying of his that he "would constrain the king to leave his kingdom quietly; but as for the Duke of York, he would compel him to wander on the face of the earth, a vagabond like Cain!" The attitude of the king, the fears that he entertained for his party and for himself, the tendency of his restless disposition, again impelled him to dangerous projects. The national party demanded that Charles II., in disinheriting his brother, should with his own hands destroy the monarchy. Charles required that the national party should at all risks submit to a prince who evidently aspired to destroy the religion and constitution of the country. Thus urged on to extremes on one side and the other, the king decided for despotism; the national party for insurrection. In 1682 two statesmen, Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Russell, were at the head of the contest: Shaftesbury, already old, ambitious, indefatigable, corrupted by every source of corruption—the court, the government, and the seductions of popularity; accustomed from his youth upwards to seek and find his fortune in intriguing and plotting; bold and supple in mind; sagacious and fertile in expedients; powerful in influencing men; equally skilled to render service and to injure, to please and to irritate; attached nevertheless by pride and foresight to the Protestant and national party, which was certainly in his eyes the strongest and the ultimate victor; and determined, in any event, to preserve his life in order to enjoy the fruit of his manœuvres or to pursue them afresh: Lord William Russell, still young, sincere, ardent, inexperienced, endowed with an inflexible temper, a heart full of faith and honor, conscientious in conspiring; ready to sacrifice his life for his cause, but incapable of doing anything indifferently for the sake of success or for his own safety. The web was woven; Lord Shaftesbury rallied around him all the malcontents.