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.