Constitutional History of England, Henry VII to George II. Volume 3 of 3

by Henry Hallam

Elated by success and general submission, exasperated by the reluctance and dissatisfaction of those on whom he had relied for an active concurrence with his desires, the king seems at least by this time to have formed the scheme of subverting, or impairing as far as possible, the religious establishment. He told Barillon, alluding to the ecclesiastical commission, that God had permitted all the statutes which had been enacted against the catholic religion to become the means of its re-establishment.[100] But the most remarkable evidence of this design was the collation of Massey, a recent convert, to the deanery of Christ Church, with a dispensation from all the statutes of uniformity and other ecclesiastical laws, so ample that it made a precedent, and such it was doubtless intended to be, for bestowing any benefices upon members of the church of Rome. This dispensation seems to have been not generally known at the time. Burnet has stated the circumstances of Massey's promotion inaccurately; and no historian, I believe, till the publication of the instrument after the middle of the last century, was fully aware of the degree in which the king had trampled upon the securities of the established church in this transaction.[101]

Dismissal of Lord Rochester.—A deeper impression was made by the dismissal of Rochester from his post of lord treasurer; so nearly consequent on his positive declaration of adherence to the protestant religion, after the dispute held in his presence at the king's particular command, between divines of both persuasions, that it had much the appearance of a resolution taken at court to exclude from the high offices of the state all those who gave no hope of conversion.[102] Clarendon had already given way to Tyrconnel in the government of Ireland; the privy seal was bestowed on a catholic peer, Lord Arundel; Lord Bellasis, of the same religion, was now placed at the head of the commission of the treasury; Sunderland, though he did not yet cease to conform, made no secret of his pretended change of opinion; the council board, by virtue of the dispensing power, was filled with those who would refuse the test; a small junto of catholics, with Father Petre, the king's confessor, at their head, took the management of almost all affairs upon themselves;[103] men, whose known want of principle gave reason to expect their compliance, were raised to bishoprics; there could be no rational doubt of a concerted scheme to depress and discountenance the established church. The dismissal of Rochester, who had gone great lengths to preserve his power and emoluments, and would in all probability have concurred in the establishment of arbitrary power under a protestant sovereign,[104] may be reckoned the most unequivocal evidence of the king's intentions; and from thence we may date the decisive measures that were taken to counteract them.

Prince of Orange alarmed.—It was, I do not merely say the interest, but the clear right and bounden duty, of the Prince of Orange, to watch over the internal politics of England, on account of the near connection which his own birth and his marriage with the presumptive heir had created. He was never to be reckoned a foreigner as to this country, which, even in the ordinary course of succession, he might be called to govern. From the time of his union with the Princess Mary, he was the legitimate and natural ally of the whig party; alien in all his sentiments from his two uncles, neither of whom, especially James, treated him with much regard, on account merely of his attachment to religion and liberty, for he might have secured their affection by falling into their plans. Before such differences as subsisted between these personages, the bonds of relationship fall asunder like flax; and William would have had at least the sanction of many precedents in history, if he had employed his influence to excite sedition against Charles or James, and to thwart their administration. Yet his conduct appears to have been merely defensive; nor had he the remotest connection with the violent and factious proceedings of Shaftesbury and his partisans. He played a very dexterous, but apparently very fair, game throughout the last years of Charles; never losing sight of the popular party, through whom alone he could expect influence over England during the life of his father-in-law, while he avoided any direct rupture with the brothers, and every reasonable pretext for their taking offence.

It has never been established by any reputable testimony, though perpetually asserted, nor is it in the least degree probable, that William took any share in prompting the invasion of Monmouth.[105] But it is nevertheless manifest that he derived the greatest advantage from this absurd rebellion and from its failure; not only, as it removed a mischievous adventurer, whom the multitude's idle predilection had elevated so high, that factious men would, under every government, have turned to account his ambitious imbecility; but as the cruelty with which this unhappy enterprise was punished rendered the king odious,[106] while the success of his arms inspired him with false confidence, and neglect of caution. Every month, as it brought forth evidence of James's arbitrary projects, increased the number of those who looked for deliverance to the Prince of Orange, either in the course of succession, or by some special interference. He had, in fact, a stronger motive for watching the councils of his father-in-law than has generally been known. The king was, at his accession, in his fifty-fifth year, and had no male children; nor did the queen's health give much encouragement to expect them. Every dream of the nation's voluntary return to the church of Rome must have vanished, even if the consent of a parliament could be obtained, which was nearly vain to think of; or if open force and the aid of France should enable James to subvert the established religion, what had the catholics to anticipate from his death, but that fearful reaction which had ensued upon the accession of Elizabeth? This had already so much disheartened the moderate part of their body that they were most anxious not to urge forward a change, for which the kingdom was not ripe, and which was so little likely to endure, and used their influence to promote a reconciliation between the king and Prince of Orange, contenting themselves with that free exercise of their worship which was permitted in Holland.[107] But the ambitious priesthood who surrounded the throne had bolder projects. A scheme was formed early in the king's reign, to exclude the Princess of Orange from the succession in favour of her sister Anne, in the event of the latter's conversion to the Romish faith. The French ministers at our court, Barillon and Bonrepos, gave ear to this hardy intrigue. They flattered themselves that both Anne and her husband were favourably disposed. But in this they were wholly mistaken. No one could be more unconquerably fixed in her religion than that princess. The king himself, when the Dutch ambassador, Van Citers, laid before him a document, probably drawn up by some catholics of his court, in which these audacious speculations were developed, declared his indignation at so criminal a project. It was not even in his power, he let the prince afterwards know by a message, or in that of parliament, according to the principles which had been maintained in his own behalf, to change the fundamental order of succession to the Crown.[108] Nothing indeed can more forcibly paint the desperation of the popish faction than their entertainment of so preposterous a scheme. But it naturally increased the solicitude of William about the intrigues of the English cabinet. It does not appear that any direct overtures were made to the Prince of Orange, except by a very few malcontents, till the embassy of Dykvelt from the States in the spring of 1687. It was William's object to ascertain, through that minister, the real state of parties in England. Such assurances as he carried back to Holland gave encouragement to an enterprise that would have been equally injudicious and unwarrantable without them.[109] Danby, Halifax, Nottingham, and others of the tory, as well as whig factions, entered into a secret correspondence with the Prince of Orange; some from a real attachment to the constitutional limitations of monarchy; some from a conviction that, without open apostasy from the protestant faith, they could never obtain from James the prizes of their ambition. This must have been the predominant motive with Lord Churchill, who never gave any proof of solicitude about civil liberty; and his influence taught the Princess Anne to distinguish her interest from those of her father. It was about this time also that even Sunderland entered upon a mysterious communication with the Prince of Orange; but whether he afterwards served his present master only to betray him, as has been generally believed, or sought rather to propitiate, by clandestine professions, one who might in the course of events become such, is not perhaps what the evidence already known to the world will enable us to determine.[110] The apologists of James have often represented Sunderland's treachery as extending back to the commencement of this reign, as if he had entered upon the king's service with no other aim than to put him on measures that would naturally lead to his ruin. But the simpler hypothesis is probably nearer the truth: a corrupt and artful statesman could have no better prospect for his own advantage than the power and popularity of a government which he administered; it was a conviction of the king's incorrigible and infatuated adherence to designs which the rising spirit of the nation rendered utterly infeasible, an apprehension that, whenever a free parliament should be called, he might experience the fate of Strafford as an expiation for the sins of the Crown, which determined him to secure as far as possible his own indemnity upon a revolution that he could not have withstood.[111]

The dismissal of Rochester was followed up at no great distance of time, by the famous declaration for liberty of conscience, suspending the execution of all penal laws concerning religion, and freely pardoning all offences against them, in as full a manner as if each individual had been named. He declared also his will and pleasure that the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, and the several tests enjoined by statutes of the late reign, should no longer be required of any one before his admission to offices of trust. The motive of this declaration was not so much to relieve the Roman catholics from penal and incapacitating statutes (which, since the king's accession and the judgment of the court of king's bench in favour of Hales, were virtually at an end), as by extending to the protestant dissenters the same full measure of toleration, to enlist under the standard of arbitrary power those who had been its most intrepid and steadiest adversaries. It was after the prorogation of parliament that he had begun to caress that party, who in the first months of his reign had endured a continuance of their persecution.[112] But the clergy in general detested the nonconformists still more than the papists, and had always abhorred the idea of even a parliamentary toleration. The present declaration went much farther than the recognised prerogative of dispensing with prohibitory statutes. Instead of removing the disability from individuals by letters patent, it swept away at once, in effect, the solemn ordinances of the legislature. There was, indeed, a reference to the future concurrence of the two houses, whenever he should think it convenient for them to meet; but so expressed as rather to insult, than pay respect to, their authority.[113] And no one could help considering the declaration of a similar nature just published in Scotland, as the best commentary on the present. In that he suspended all laws against the Roman catholics and moderate presbyterians, "by his sovereign authority, prerogative royal, and absolute power, which all his subjects were to obey without reserve;" and its whole tenor spoke, in as unequivocal language as his grandfather was accustomed to use, his contempt of all pretended limitations on his will.[114] Though the constitution of Scotland was not so well balanced as our own, it was notorious that the Crown did not legally possess an absolute power in that kingdom; and men might conclude that, when he should think it less necessary to observe some measures with his English subjects, he would address them in the same strain.

Those, indeed, who knew by what course his favour was to be sought, did not hesitate to go before, and light him, as it were, to the altar on which their country's liberty was to be the victim. Many of the addresses which fill the columns of the London Gazette in 1687, on occasion of the declaration of indulgence, flatter the king with assertions of his dispensing power. The benchers and barristers of the Middle Temple, under the direction of the prostitute Shower, were again foremost in the race of infamy. They thank him "for asserting his own royal prerogatives, the very life of the law, and of their profession; which prerogatives, as they were given by God himself, so no power upon earth could diminish them, but they must always remain entire and inseparable from his royal person; which prerogatives as the addressers had studied to know, so they were resolved to defend, by asserting with their lives and fortunes that divine maxim, à Deo rex, à lege rex."[115]

These addresses, which, to the number of some hundreds, were sent up from every description of persons, the clergy, the nonconformists of all denominations, the grand juries, the justices of the peace, the corporations, the inhabitants of towns, in consequence of the declaration, afford a singular contrast to what we know of the prevailing dispositions of the people in that year, and of their general abandonment of the king's cause before the end of the next. Those from the clergy, indeed, disclose their ill-humour at the unconstitutional indulgence, limiting their thanks to some promises of favour the king had used towards the established church. But as to the rest, we should have cause to blush for the servile hypocrisy of our ancestors, if there were not good reason to believe that these addresses were sometimes the work of a small minority in the name of the rest, and that the grand juries and the magistracy in general had been so garbled for the king's purposes in this year that they formed a very inadequate representation of that great class from which they ought to have been taken.[116] It was however very natural that they should deceive the court. The catholics were eager for that security which nothing but an act of the legislature could afford; and James, who, as well as his minister, had a strong aversion to the measure, seems about the latter end of the summer of 1687 to have made a sudden change in his scheme of government, and resolved once more to try the disposition of a parliament. For this purpose, having dissolved that from which he could expect nothing hostile to the church, he set himself to manage the election of another in such a manner as to ensure his main object, the security of the Romish religion.[117]

"His first care," says his biographer Innes, "was to purge the corporations from that leaven which was in danger of corrupting the whole kingdom; so he appointed certain regulators to inspect the conduct of several borough towns, to correct abuses where it was practicable, and where not, by forfeiting their charters, to turn out such rotten members as infected the rest. But in this, as in most other cases, the king had the fortune to choose persons not too well qualified for such an employment, and extremely disagreeable to the people; it was a sort of motley council made up of catholics and presbyterians, a composition which was sure never to hold long together, or that could probably unite in any method suitable to both their interests; it served therefore only to increase the public odium by their too arbitrary ways of turning out and putting in; and yet those who were thus intruded, as it were, by force, being of the presbyterian party, were by this time become as little inclinable to favour the king's intentions as the excluded members."[118]