The Last Revolution Read online

  To drum up popular support Shaftesbury sent the Duke on a tour of the West Country in the summer of 1680. It was a theatrical triumph. John Whiting, a young Somerset farmer, saw the Duke in Ilchester

  ‘with some thousands on horseback attending him; the country flocking to him and after him; the eyes of the nation being upon him and towards him, as the hopes and head of the Protestant interest at that time, in opposition to the Duke of York and Popish Party.’19

  Like his mother, Monmouth was beautiful and insipid, ‘the darling of his father, and the ladies’, as John Evelyn described him, ‘extraordinarily handsome, and adroit: an excellent soldier, & dancer, a favourite of the people’.20 John Whiting was a Quaker, and unable to uncover his head for anybody – even for this man who would be King. Seeing the determined little group of Quakers by the Friary Gate, Monmouth cheerily took off his own hat and waved it at them with a flourish. At Hinton St George he ‘accidentally’ touched a woman with scrofula and she was cured. Such miracles belonged to kings. Rumours abounded of a ‘black box’ containing proof that Charles II and Lucy Walter had secretly married – so elevating Monmouth to rightful heir. Twice in the course of the crisis the House of Commons passed Bills to prevent James Duke of York from being crowned. Without Parliament, Charles had no access to funds. London was firmly in Whig hands. It seemed only a matter of time before James Duke of Monmouth was accepted as heir, ensuring that James Duke of York would never have a Coronation Day.

  This was the substance of the political crisis which Francis and Roger North outlined for their brother in April 1680. But their own viewpoint was not that of the ‘Whigs’ at Exeter House or the chanting crowds in London. Francis and Roger North were ‘Tories’, High Churchmen loyal to the King and the hereditary succession, and very many shared their position. For Tories, the crisis was a frightening attempt to drag the country back to the days of the Commonwealth. Their suspicions could only have been heightened by the men around Shaftesbury. John Wildman was the ‘fanatic’ who had put the case of the army in the 1647 Putney debates while Robert Ferguson, ‘tall, lean ... [with] a great Roman nose’,21 was a Scottish minister who had once been close to the Puritan leader John Owen. Few now remembered the Commonwealth with much affection. Roger North had been born in 1653, and ‘even at school,’ he recalled,

  ‘I used to stand up for the Crown and its power ... And I cannot to this hour ... tell from what spring this humour arose, unless it were that universal alacrity which was upon the King’s return, while I was a very boy ... I believe ... that I thought a king to be a brave thing, and those that killed him base men, and consequently the coming back of his son a glorious triumph.’22

  There was great appeal in the Tory argument that factious England could only be held together by devoted obedience to the crown and a strong, single church. Edmund Bohun, the editor of Filmer, wrote a pamphlet during the crisis.

  ‘We may change our present monarchy for another Oliver Cromwell, who was as absolute as the King of France. But what shall we get by that? And again, suppose we could set up a parliament without a King, would not this be an arbitrary government?’23

  Although written earlier, Filmer’s Patriarcha was first published as part of the paper war which intensified through 1680, and there was much in it for thoughtful men like Edmund Bohun and the Norths to approve. Theorists like Algernon Sidney talked of a ‘contract’ between King and subjects, and the ‘right’ of people to resist when the King broke it. An attractive idea, perhaps, but where was this contract and – more important – who was to decide when resistance was justified? ‘If every ambitious and factious man’, Edmund Bohun would write, ‘[is] at liberty to insinuate into the rabble ... that Princes are to be punished when they do amiss ... this can only serve to fill the world with rebellions, wars and confusions, in which more thousands of men and estates must of necessity be ruined, and wives ravished and murthered in the space of a few days, than can be destroyed by the worst tyrant that ever trod upon the earth.’24 Nothing mattered more than peace and order to a generation which had grown up during civil war. The cure was worse than the ill. Freedom was a chimera, a ‘new, plausible and dangerous opinion’, (as Filmer himself wrote) which ‘the common people everywhere tenderly embrace ... who magnify liberty as if the height of human felicity were only to be found in it, never remembering that the desire of liberty was the cause of the fall of Adam’.25 Patriarcha offered something more real than ‘freedom’, a sense of belonging. Resistance to the King was impossible. Without certainty there could only be anarchy.

  All this was a reasonable creed for men who had grown up in the troubles of 1659, as Edmund Bohun and Roger North had. Over the next few years both would come into Archbishop Sancroft’s orbit, Roger North as his legal adviser, Edmund Bohun among the Tory writers he patronised (Roger North thought the Suffolk-born Archbishop liked to surround himself with East Anglians). Bohun remembered that when Englishmen set themselves against the King before, they ended up the slaves of Parliament, ‘and it was God’s great mercy that ever we recovered our former state of liberty, which commenced with his late Majesty’s restoration, and may last till we forfeit it again by another rebellion, if we ourselves do not destroy it by our folly’.26

  In March 1681, Charles II called a new parliament, his third in as many years. He summoned them not to London, but to the old Royalist stronghold of Oxford. Months before, the House of Commons had passed another Exclusion Bill, only to see it talked out in the House of Lords by ‘the Trimmer’, the Earl of Halifax. Halifax had shown sympathy for Shaftesbury’s cause to start with, but in the end he could go no further down a path which seemed to be leading England back into its own turbulent history. ‘We cannot but remember’, the King would write soon afterwards, ‘that religion, liberty and property were all lost and gone when the Monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that was restored.’27 After just a week, Charles peremptorily dissolved the Oxford parliament, and the Exclusion Crisis was over. He would never call a parliament again.

  Many were on the King’s side, and still more were fearful of civil strife, but those were not the only reasons Charles survived the Exclusion Crisis without making any concessions. English politicians were notoriously insular, obsessed with political debates which to the rest of the world seemed arcane, but, like it or not, events in Europe kept intruding on English affairs. It was a sign both of English weakness and the overbearing power of Louis XIV that the French King could bring the crisis to an end whenever he chose, just as he had started it.

  Nothing had so escalated Popish Plot paranoia into full-blown constitutional crisis as the revelation, in December 1678, that Charles II was taking bribes from Louis XIV. Charles had accepted French money, it turned out, to support Louis against the United Provinces in 1672. It was fortunate for him that the parallel agreement by which he promised to convert England to Catholicism remained secret; bad enough that he had sworn to suspend Parliament and to help crush a Protestant nation. Louis himself allowed details of this arrangement to leak out in order to provoke an English crisis. He disliked the pro-Dutch Earl of Danby, Charles’s leading minister in the late 1670s, and disliked the marriage Danby had arranged in 1677 between Mary, the Duke of York’s daughter by his first wife Anne Hyde, and William of Orange. French subsidies had been cut off; it was the ensuing financial crisis which forced Charles to call a parliament. Three years later the Earl of Danby was gone, lucky to escape with his head, and Charles had experienced a brief, bruising taste of life outside the Sun King’s orbit. The French ambassador wrote to his master to warn that the punishment had gone far enough. Shortly afterwards, a relieved Charles accepted renewed supplies, promising in return to rule without Parliament. That was what gave Charles the power to dismiss his MPs from Oxford in March 1681.

  The next few years saw the total defeat of the men who, in Tory eyes, had tried to drag the nation back into civil war. Monmouth went into exile. Shaftesbury was tried for treason. A London jur
y protected him with a verdict of ignoramus, but shortly afterwards he, too, fled to Holland, where he died. The Tory Norths launched themselves enthusiastically into this reaction. Dudley North had bought a house in the City and dived into London politics to help wrest control of the capital from the ‘fanatics’. In 1682 Thomas Papillon, cousin of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was elected Sheriff. Sir John Moore, the new Tory Lord Mayor, appointed Dudley North over his head. Moore’s successor upheld Dudley’s appointment, was briefly arrested by Whig magistrates, then sued Thomas Papillon for £10,000 damages and forced him into exile to escape the debt. The bench of Aldermen was purged of Whigs; within a year London was forced to give up its charter. Sir Patience Ward, Whig Lord Mayor in 1680, was charged with perjury and also driven across the North Sea into exile. Meanwhile, some of the surviving Whigs, cheated of victory in Parliament, turned to violence, hatching a plot to assassinate the King and his brother at Rye House on their way back from Newmarket. Such, at least, was the accusation made against Algernon Sidney and William Russell; Roger North was on the legal team which prepared the case against Algernon Sidney, and he had no doubt of the defendants’ guilt. As Sheriff of London, Dudley helped prepare the juries. He was standing on the scaffold when William Russell was executed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in July 1683.

  Tory victory seemed complete. A return to the dark days of Civil War and Commonwealth had been averted. But at what price?

  James, Duke of York, would inherit the throne, and there was no doubt now about his politics. ‘If his Majesty make but one step more,’ he wrote at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, ‘I mean make any farther concessions, he is gone.’28 That was the lesson James had drawn from England’s past: yield no ground. There were some who could agree with that, perhaps, but the Duke’s religion was a different matter. For Tories like the Norths and Edmund Bohun, the nation rested on two pillars, the crown and the Church of England. They wanted an end to confusion. In politics, all power belonged to the crown, in religion to the Church of England. That was the Restoration settlement. But could a Catholic King protect the Anglican Church, or would he assault it? Would the twin guardians of Tory security survive when James reached the throne, or would he set one against the other?

  At the beginning of February 1685, Charles II suffered a stroke. He lingered for four days of terrible uncertainty, as Roger North remembered, while England contemplated the alternatives of a Catholic King or a Commonwealth coup d’état.

  ‘I cannot pass by the melancholy course of life we had during that sickness. My brother [Francis] was at Court ... He foresaw and knew the train of evils to come if the King did not recover, and it darkened his soul ... I had the company of my brother Dudley ... We walked about like ghosts, generally to and from Whitehall. We met few persons without passion in their eyes, as we also had. We thought of no concerns, public or private, but were contented to live and breathe as if we had nought else to do but to expect the issue of this grand crisis.’29

  When the moment came, the two brothers ran to Whitehall, ‘crossed up the Banqueting House stairs, got to the leads a-top, and there laid us down upon ... the flat stones over the balusters, expecting the proclamation, which then soon came out ... And we two on the top of the balusters were the first that gave the shout, and signal with our hats for the rest to shout.’ The old King was dead. James II was King. And so opened ‘an inglorious and unprosperous reign’, as the historian Gilbert Burnet famously described it,

  ‘that was begun with great advantages: but these were so poorly managed, and so ill improved, that bad designs were ill laid, and worse conducted; and all came, in conclusion, under one of the strangest catastrophes that is in any history.’30

  The catastrophe to come was, indeed, one of the strangest in history, but about James’s advantages Burnet was wrong. The new King did not inherit a stable nation. The Restoration had not removed the deep-rooted constitutional malaise which had crippled England for half a century. ‘Never so joyful a day’, John Evelyn had written of the morning Charles Stuart rode back into London in 1660. ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.’ Twenty-five years later he looked back on Charles’s reign as ‘very troublesome & improsperous, by wars, plagues, fires, loss of reputation by a universal neglect of the public’.31 James II inherited a slow-burning crisis whose fuse was still alight. Abroad, England, le païs des révolutions, as one Frenchman described it, was forever changing sides, forever disappointing her partisans, governed by a King who relied on Louis of France for hand-outs, while at home the nation swung between an autocracy too weak to sustain itself and parliaments which brought only faction and chaos. The prerogative powers of the Crown were no better defined than they had been forty years earlier; nor had any better balance been discovered between the constituent parts of the government. Even the reestablishment of the Church of England had only masked England’s religious differences, not solved them. There were exiles in Holland who bitterly opposed the new King, meanwhile, and the Duke of Monmouth was still very much alive.

  And now the nation had a Catholic king. ‘This great change produced great thoughts of heart’, Edmund Bohun wrote, when James went to mass publicly within days of his succession. ‘Much fear and confusion took possession of the minds of men, for fear the Church of England should be ruined.’32 Looking down at the crowds as he and Dudley proclaimed King James, Roger North ‘had the reflection of the fable of the fly upon the wheel, we animalcules there fancying we raised all that noise which ascended from below’.33 Only time would tell whether their loyalty could save the nation from strife.

  III

  ‘A FAVOURITE OF THE PEOPLE’

  John Locke had gone into exile in August 1683. He had no time even to arrange his own papers. ‘What you dislike you may burn’, he wrote hastily to his friend Edward Clarke before he left,

  ‘Pray talk with Dr Thomas about the best way of securing the books and goods in my chamber at Christ Church if there should be any danger ... Upon consideration I have thought it best to make a will.’1

  English radicals flooded across the North Sea to escape the consequences of the Rye House Plot. ‘If the English tumble over so as they do now,’ joked the English consul in Amsterdam, ‘this may be a little London in time.’2 Among them were John Wildman, Robert Ferguson and Slingsby Bethel. Thomas Papillon found a house in Utrecht, and sent his wife a plan of the rooms so she could choose furniture, but even for a wealthy man exile would be a lonely time. ‘As I wrote thee, I cannot live comfortably without thee. All the world is nothing to me in comparison; and indeed I live as a prisoner, and one out of the world, conversing with none.’3

  Locke went first to the house of Thomas Dare in Amsterdam. That was one meeting-place for political exiles to talk politics and the news from home; others were Jacob Vandervelde’s bookshop and the Croom Elbow coffee house. The exiles were plagued by English spies, however, and most cultivated innocence. In letters to England Locke protested disinterest in all politics.

  ‘I have ... no other aims than to pass silently through this world with the company of a few good friends and books ... As to company I am said to keep at coffee houses ... I must needs be [a fool] if I should ... keep company with men, whom every one that would be safe shuns.’4

  He would spend his time in exile studying medicine, Locke insisted. He even asked his friend Edward Clarke for a copy of the Tractatus de Morbo Gallico – a tract on the ‘French disease’, syphilis – which he had left behind. Locke’s protestations of a bookish life were disingenuous, however. The ‘French disease’ which interested him was not syphilis but absolutism. The Tractatus de Morbo Gallico was cover for the Two Treatises of Government he had written at the time of the Exclusion Crisis.

  In those treatises John Locke set out a vision of the political world which could not have been more different from the monarchical certainties of Robert Filmer. Locke stripped away all preconceptions to examine the fundamental questions of government from first principles. Ima
gine a world before Kings and parliaments; what was left? A state of nature in which men were all equal to one another, and all free; in which men and women lived with no law between them but the law of reason.

  A paradise, if all respected one another. But thanks to ‘the corruption and viciousness of degenerate men’, this state of nature was not, after all, an Eden. The reason for that was property. As soon as one man possessed something for himself, others would try to take it from him. It was this, Locke concluded, which drove people to join in society ‘with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates’.5

  It was on the rule of law that Locke founded his vision of freedom. Society could only operate by laws ‘indifferent, and the same to all parties’. And laws had to be appropriate to the kind of property they were established to protect. Much of the Second Treatise – the first was a point-by-point refutation of Filmer – concerned the nature of property. By property, Locke did not mean only inherited estates; he defined it as whatever men united to protect, whatever they stood to lose – ‘Lives, Liberties, and Estates ... I call by the general Name, Property.’ When an Indian hunter killed a deer running across a meadow, ‘tis allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before, it was the common right of every one’. What was clear, however, was that modern societies had come a long way from such simple transactions as the killing of a deer. Even a loaf of bread now depended on a whole catalogue of interacting materials: ‘iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dying-drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship, that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work, all which, ‘twould be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up’.6 Property, in other words, had become far more complex than before. The invention of money, in particular, had wound it to so high a degree of sophistication that both laws and the institutions which created them had to progress correspondingly in order to protect it. Absolute monarchies might have been appropriate to primitive societies of hunters, but they were so no longer to the complex trading nations that were emerging in the late seventeenth century. ‘If it be lawful for us ... to build houses, ships and forts, better than our ancestors,’ Algernon Sidney had written, ‘why have we not the same right in matters of government?’7 While James II was drawn to political and religious creeds which tried to reimpose simple certainties on a world become frighteningly diverse, John Locke’s Second Treatise presented a political theory which could adapt to that diversity.