History of the English People, Volume VI / Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683

by John Richard Green

But if the issues of St. Bartholomew's Day have been harmful to the spiritual life of the English Church they have been in the highest degree advantageous to the cause of religious liberty. At the Restoration religious freedom seemed again to have been lost. Only the Independents and a few despised sects, such as the Quakers, upheld the right of every man to worship God according to the bidding of his own conscience. The bulk of the Puritan Party, with the Presbyterians at its head, was at one with its opponents in desiring a uniformity of worship, if not of belief, throughout the land. Had the two great parties within the Church held together their weight would have been almost irresistible. Fortunately the great severance of St. Bartholomew's Day drove out the Presbyterians from the Church to which they clung, and forced them into a general union with sects which they had hated till then almost as bitterly as the bishops themselves. A common persecution soon blended the Nonconformists into one. Persecution broke down before the numbers, the wealth, and the political weight of the new sectarians; and the Church for the first time in its history found itself confronted with an organized body of Dissenters without its pale. The impossibility of crushing such a body as this wrested from English statesmen the first legal recognition of freedom of worship in the Toleration Act; their rapid growth in later times has by degrees stripped the Church of almost all the exclusive privileges which it enjoyed as a religious body, and now threatens what remains of its official connexion with the State. With these remoter consequences however we are not as yet concerned. It is enough to note here that with the Act of Uniformity and the expulsion of the Puritan clergy a new element in our religious and political history, the element of Dissent, the influence of the Nonconformist churches, comes first into play.

Charles and Clarendon.

The sudden outbreak and violence of the persecution, the breaking up of conventicles, the imprisonment of those who were found worshipping in them, turned the disappointment of the Presbyterians into despair. Many were for retiring to Holland, others proposed a general flight to New England and the American colonies. Among the Baptists and Independents there was vague talk of an appeal to arms. So threatening indeed did the attitude of the Sectaries become that Clarendon was anxious to provide himself with men and money and above all with foreign aid for such a struggle, should it come. Different indeed as were the aims of the king and his Chancellor the course of events drew them inevitably together. If Charles desired the friendship of France as a support in any possible struggle with the Parliament Clarendon desired it as a support in the possible struggle with the Nonconformists. The first step in this French policy had been the marriage with Catharine of Braganza; the second was the surrender of Dunkirk. The maintenance of the garrison at Dunkirk was a heavy drag upon the royal treasury, and a proposal for its sale to Spain, which was made by Lord Sandwich in council, was seized by Charles and Clarendon as a means of opening a bargain with France. To France the profit was immense. Not only was a port gained in the Channel which served during the next hundred years as a haunt for privateers in every war between the two powers, but the withdrawal of the English garrison at the close of 1662 from a port which necessarily drew England into every contest between France and Spain freed the hands of Lewis for the stroke he was patiently planning against the Low Countries. Lewis however proved a shrewd bargainer, and not a half of the sum originally demanded as its price found its way into the royal treasury. But the money was accepted as a pledge of the close connexion which was to bind the two crowns together. Charles declared the cession to be "one of the greatest proofs he could give of his friendship for the French king," and the Duke of York pressed the bargain with assurances that his strongest desire, like that of his brother, was "to unite our interests with those of France." Clarendon was as desirous of such a union as his master. In his eyes the friendship of France, the money, the force placed in his hands by the return of the garrison of Dunkirk to England, were so many safeguards against the outbreak of rebellion which his policy had provoked.

Ashley Cooper.

But he had reckoned without Charles, and the time was come when the king was to show how widely his temper and aim differed from those of his Chancellor. Charles had no taste for civil war, nor had he the slightest wish to risk his throne in securing the supremacy of the Church. His aim was to use the strife between the two great bodies of Protestant religionists so as to secure toleration for the Catholics and revive at the same time his prerogative of dispensing with the execution of laws. At the close of 1662 therefore he suddenly broke from the policy of Clarendon and laid his plans for toleration before the Presbyterian party who were struggling against the Chancellor in the royal council. Of that party Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, was now in influence, though not in rank, the chief. Every step in his career had brought out the boldness, the self-reliance, the versatility and readiness of resource which distinguished his character. In mere boyhood he had saved his estate from the greed of his guardians by boldly appealing in person for protection to Noy, who was then attorney-general. As an undergraduate at Oxford he organized a rebellion of the freshmen against the oppressive customs which were enforced by the senior men of his college, and succeeded in abolishing them. At eighteen he was a member of the Short Parliament. On the outbreak of the Civil War he took part with the king; but in the midst of the royal successes he foresaw the ruin of the royal cause, passed to the Parliament, attached himself to the fortunes of Cromwell, and became member of the Council of State. A temporary disgrace during the last years of the Protectorate only quickened him to a restless hatred which did much to bring about its fall. His bitter invectives against the dead Protector, his intrigues with Monk, and the active part which he took in the king's recall, were rewarded at the Restoration with a peerage and with promotion to a foremost share in the royal councils.

Ashley was then a man of forty, and under the Commonwealth he had been famous in Dryden's contemptuous phrase as "the loudest bagpipe of the squeaking train"; but he was no sooner a minister of Charles than he flung himself into the debauchery of the Court with an ardour which surprised even his master. "You are the wickedest dog in England!" laughed the king at some unscrupulous jest of his counsellor's. "Of a subject, sir, I believe I am!" was the unabashed reply. But the debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was in fact temperate by nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess impossible. Men soon found that the courtier who lounged in Lady Castlemaine's boudoir, or drank and jested with Sedley and Buckingham, was a diligent and able man of business. "He is a man," says the puzzled Pepys, three years after the Restoration, "of great business and yet of pleasure and dissipation too." His rivals were as envious of the ease and mastery with which he dealt with questions of finance as of the "nimble wit" which won the favour of the king. Even in later years his industry earned the grudging praise of his enemies. Dryden owned that as Chancellor he was "swift to despatch and easy of access," and wondered at the fevered activity which "refused his age the needful hours of rest." His activity indeed was the more wonderful that his health was utterly broken. An accident in early days left behind it an abiding weakness whose traces were seen in the furrows which seamed his long pale face, in the feebleness of his health, and the nervous tremor which shook his puny frame. The "pigmy body" was "fretted to decay" by the "fiery soul" within it. But pain and weakness brought with them no sourness of spirit. Ashley was attacked more unscrupulously than any statesman save Walpole; but Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he was never bitter or angry in speaking of his assailants. Even the wit with which he crushed them was commonly good-humoured. "When will you have done preaching?" a bishop murmured testily, as he was speaking in the House of Peers. "When I am a bishop, my Lord!" was the laughing reply.

Ashley's Policy.

As a statesman Ashley not only stood high among his contemporaries from his wonderful readiness and industry, but he stood far above them in his scorn of personal profit. Even Dryden, while raking together every fault in his character, owns that his hands were clean. As a political leader his position was to modern eyes odd enough. In religion he was at most a Deist, with some fanciful notions "that after death our souls lived in stars," and his life was that of a debauchee. But Deist and debauchee as he was he remained the representative of the Presbyterian and Nonconformist party in the Royal Council. He was the steady and vehement advocate of toleration, but his advocacy was based on purely political grounds. He saw that persecution would fail to bring back the Dissenters to the Church, and that the effort to recall them only left the country disunited. He saw too that such a disunion exposed English liberty to invasion from the Crown, while it robbed England herself of all influence in Europe at a time when her influence alone could effectually check the ambition of France. The one means of uniting Churchmen and Dissidents was by a policy of toleration, but in the temper of England after the Restoration he saw no hope of obtaining toleration save from the king. Wit, debauchery, rapidity in the despatch of business, were all therefore used as a means to gain influence over the king, and to secure him as a friend in the struggle which Ashley carried on against the intolerance of Clarendon.

The first Declaration of Indulgence.

Charles, as we have seen, had his own game to play, and his own reasons for protecting Ashley during his vehement struggle against the Test and Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity, and the persecution of the Dissidents. But the struggle had been fruitless, and the only chance—as it seemed to Ashley—of securing toleration was to receive it on the king's own terms. It was with the assent therefore of the Presbyterian party in the Council that Charles issued in December a royal proclamation which expressed the king's resolve to exempt from the penalties of the Acts which had been passed "those who living peaceably do not conform themselves thereunto through scruple and tenderness of misguided conscience, but modestly and without scandal perform their devotions in their own way." The desire for toleration had in fact not only overcome their dread of Catholicism, but even blinded them to the political dangers of a revival of the dispensing power. The indulgence applied equally to Catholics as to Protestants; it was in itself a bold assertion of the royal prerogative of suspending the execution of the law. The Presbyterian statesmen indeed aimed at giving the dispensing power a legal basis. A bill introduced by Lords Ashley and Robartes in the opening of 1663, in redemption of a pledge contained in the declaration itself, gave Charles the power to dispense not only with the provisions of the Act of Uniformity but with the penalties provided by all laws which enforced religious conformity or which imposed religious tests. But the policy of Charles as of Ashley broke instantly down before the good sense as well as the religious passion of the people at large. If the Presbyterian leaders in the council had stooped to accept the aid of the declaration, the bulk of the Dissidents had no mind to have their grievances used as a means of procuring by a side wind toleration for Roman Catholics, or of building up again that dispensing power which the civil wars had thrown down. The Churchmen on the other hand with the bishops at their head were resolute in opposition. Ever since the issue of the Declaration of Indulgence the hatred felt by the Churchmen for the Dissidents had been embittered by suspicions of a secret league between the Dissidents and the Catholics in which the king was taking part. The Houses therefore struck simultaneously at both their opponents. They forced Charles by an address to withdraw his pledge of toleration. They then extorted from him a proclamation for the banishment of all Catholic priests, and followed this up by a Conventicle Act, which punished with fine, imprisonment, and transportation on a third offence all persons who met in greater number than five for any religious worship save that of the Common Prayer.