The Last Revolution Read online

  Whatever James actually thought of the revocation, whatever diplomatic balancing act he felt himself to be engaged in, the message to England was clear. How could English men and women avoid asking whether they, too, would be forced to convert to Rome? Would soldiers break down their doors, as they had the doors of Jaques Fontaine and Anne Elisabeth Boursiquot? Here was a chance for the King to demonstrate to his loyal subjects that he was not, as exclusionists had once warned, bent on forcibly converting England to the Catholic faith. James ignored it. Worse, in the middle of the crisis he took Samuel Pepys into his closet and eagerly showed him proof of Charles Il’s deathbed conversion to Rome, rumours of which were already circulating in London coffee houses. Perhaps it was not true that James told Barillon the forcible conversion of Protestants was ‘so important a work ... that God will grant you the favour to finish it entirely’,8 but everyone in England was aware of the sermon preached by the Bishop of Valence in July which exhorted Louis to join James in arms and extirpate the Protestant heresy from English soil. And there was no mistaking some of the other signals coming out of Whitehall. This was the time of year for demonstrations of Protestant solidarity, the anniversary of the gunpowder plot on 5 November followed by Elizabeth I’s accession on 17 November. It was the time of year when, during the Exclusion Crisis, Londoners had set off fireworks and burned effigies of the Pope. Now the Gazette printed an Order in Council ‘that no persons whatsoever do presume to make ... any bonfires or other public fireworks at or upon any Festival Day ... without particular permission from his Majesty’.

  There was grim news from elsewhere in England as well – grim, at least, when nerves were jangling with fears of arbitrary persecution and royal violence. When Anne Elisabeth Boursiquot landed in the West Country on 1 December, she expected to find a haven from persecution. If so, the first sight which greeted her was doubly shocking: ‘[The] heads and quarters of men who had been executed a few days before ... were at the crossroads, towers, and gates of the cities looking like butchers’ shops. Their greatest and almost only crime was being Presbyterians.’9 Two months earlier Judge George Jeffreys had passed through the West Country to try Monmouth’s rebels in the September Assizes.

  John Evelyn dined with Jeffreys shortly after he returned to London. He noted the judge’s ‘assured and undaunted spirit’, but added in a margin note, ‘of nature cruel and a slave to [the] Court’.10 Of humble origins, Jeffreys made his career through aggressive self-confidence, an overbearing manner in court, and bulldog loyalty to his political masters. He had prosecuted the hapless Catholics accused by William Bedloe, and sentenced Algernon Sidney to death. He drank to dull the pain he suffered from a bladder stone. Gilbert Burnet described a man whose

  ‘behaviour was beyond anything that was ever heard of in a civilised nation. He was perpetually either drunk or in a rage ... The impieties with which he berated them, and his behaviour towards some of the nobility and gentry [who] came and pleaded in favour of some prisoners, would have amazed one, if done by a bashaw in Turkey. England had never known anything like it.’11

  ‘I’ll hold you a wager of it,’ George Jeffreys bragged to one cowering jury, ‘I can smell a Presbyterian forty miles off.’ The Bloody Assizes would turn Jeffreys into a monster of legendary proportions. ‘I tell you that there is not one of those lying, snivelling Presbyterian rascals but one way or other had a hand in the late horrid conspiracy’, he said as he sentenced the octogenarian Dame Alicia Lisle to be burnt at the stake for harbouring a Dissenting minister. ‘Had she been my own mother, I would have found her guilty.’ In nine days, he sentenced 251 men to death. He ordered that the executions should be scattered across the west, and to death added the horrific rituals of mutilation and dismemberment which the law reserved for traitors. At Melcombe Regis it was recorded how the parts were distributed around the district: ‘To Upway, 4 quarters and 1 head – Sutton Points, 2 quarters and 1 head – to Osmington, 4 quarters and 1 head.’12

  John Whiting was still in prison when the executions took place. All summer long he had shared his quarters with Monmouth rebels. Conditions were much worse than before. Fourteen Quakers were shut up in a small room and ‘hand-bolts’ applied; he would never forget how the row of men lay chained together, unable to turn over in the late summer heat. Before the trials he watched officials wheedling confessions out of the rebels; now he watched the same men led out for execution. ‘There were eight executed, quartered, and their bowels burnt on the market-place before our prison window’, he wrote. ‘I went out of the way because I would not see it, but the fire was not out when I returned.’13 To some this was a time of biblical suffering. ‘What hanging of husbands and sons!’ wrote Stephen Towgood in Axminster.

  ‘How many places even soaked with blood! ... In the meantime religion lay a-dying. The poor interest of Christ was in grave clothes, light departing ... can any tender heart forbear to cry out and say, Lord help for the glory of thy name?’14

  Very few in England had supported the Puritan zealots in the Duke of Monmouth’s army. The rebels were traitors, and deserved death. No one was as shocked as we are today by the grisly ritual of hanging, drawing and quartering. But even James, in the memoirs he wrote later, thought the treatment of the Monmouth rebels went too far. There was no sign at the Bloody Assizes of the curtana, the sword of mercy. John Whiting thought it was ‘forcing poor men to hale about men’s quarters, like horse-flesh or carrion, to boil and hang them up as monuments of their cruelty and inhumanity ... which lost King James the hearts of many; and it had been well he had shewed mercy when it was in his power’.15

  Soon afterwards Henry Purcell would compose a theatre song for his friend, the poet Thomas D’Urfey. It was very different from the anthems he had written for the coronation:

  ‘So lawful Princes when they Tyrants prove,

  themselves abuse, and Power lose,

  their Strength depending on their Subjects’ Love;

  for Love obliges Duty more than Fear.

  All hate the Government that is too severe;

  all, all hate the Government that is too severe.’16

  Parliament met again on 9 November 1685. The MPs’ mood was quite unlike their relief of the summer. The gossip as they queued to enter St Stephen’s Chapel was about the moderate Earl of Halifax, ‘the Trimmer’, who had just been dismissed from the Privy Council. The King was said to have fastened on a strategy to further his own religion: he would repeal the Test Act, the legislation which excluded Catholics from all offices, civil and military, and on which Anglicans relied to save the state from Rome. ‘The times began to grow sour’, wrote Roger North, queuing among them as MP for Dunwich. ‘All favour leaned towards the Catholics and such as prostituted to that interest. We who were steady to the laws and the church were worst looked upon.’17

  That was not all. The King had raised an army to defeat Monmouth, but he had not disbanded it. All summer long, 15,000 men had remained camped on Hounslow Heath, ‘to the astonishment of the people of England, who had not so much in histories heard of any such thing in time of peace’.18 Standing armies were an affront to English liberties. It was the raising of armies which had initiated the Civil War. In 1685 they could not but recall the dragonnades by which French soldiers had forced Protestants to abandon their faith. Surely that could not happen in Protestant England? Catholics in England were only a tiny minority of the population. Unfortunately there was one scenario which seemed almost believable – at least in the hysterical atmosphere after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. James’s third kingdom, Ireland, was fervently Catholic, and among the troops on Hounslow Heath there were known to be Irish soldiers and officers. Could James be planning to use them on his own people? The Test Act required him to decommission all Catholics once the immediate crisis was over. But James now told astonished parliamentarians that he would not do so.

  ‘I will deal plainly with you, that after having had the benefit of their service in such time of need and dan
ger, I will [not] expose ... myself to want of them, if there should be another rebellion to make them necessary for me.’

  What other rebellion? Their own? It hardly soothed MPs’ fears that those Catholic officers, as the King blithely told them, ‘are most of them well known to me ... having formerly served with me in several occasions’.’19 On the next day the House rebelled. This was a parliament whose members were derided by Whigs as Tory stooges. They believed as one of their firmest principles in unconditional obedience to their sovereign; nonetheless they voted that the commissions of the Catholic officers were illegal.

  The King’s response would become familiar enough to English politicians over the next few years. Peremptory and ill-tempered, a colonel dressing down junior officers, ‘I did not expect’, he blustered,

  ‘such an address from the House of Commons ... I had reason to hope that the reputation God hath blessed me with in the world, would have created and confirmed a greater confidence in you of me, and of all that I say to you.’

  When this was read to the Commons, there was ‘a profound silence in the House for some time’.’20 Then John Coke, MP for Derby, stood up and shouted, ‘I hope we are all Englishmen and not to be frightened out of our duty with a few hard words.’ He was bundled out of the chamber. On 20 November, James abruptly prorogued his parliament after a session which had lasted only eleven days. Three days later the King announced that he intended to use his prerogative powers to dispense Catholic army officers from the Test Act.

  The use of prerogative power was supported by royalist theorists like Robert Filmer but it was deeply controversial. A civil war had already been fought over Parliament’s right to vote on legislation. This was not how Tories had understood James’s pledge to ‘preserve the Government in Church and State as it is by law established’.

  And so James’s first year on the throne ended in foreboding. Part of the King’s problem was that everything he did struck echoes from the past. ‘Dissolutions and prorogations’ had marked every previous descent into political crisis. And the Whigs of the Exclusion Crisis had been successful in one thing at least: they had told England what to look for in a Catholic King. A powder trail had been laid in the public mind – a standing army, the dissolution of Parliament, then rule by prerogative power, arbitrary government and popery. Was this James’s ambition? Did he really mean to turn England into a country like France – an absolute monarchy in the Catholic faith? No one could be certain. That was exactly the journey the King appeared to have embarked on, however, and down that path he now proceeded, either insensible to or careless of the fuses hissing and spluttering all around him.

  IX

  ‘THE MODE OF LIVING OF THE CHINEZES’

  England’s political shadows may have been deepening, but the foreground was a brightly-lit scene of gay fashions and extravagant spending. It was not only the transformation of London which startled Dudley North on his return to England. The lifestyle of its inhabitants had also changed. The first novelties to catch his eye were the ubiquitous coffee houses. ‘There were scarce any when he was last before in England; and, for certain, none at all when he first went out’1* – now every street and square seemed to have its own. Clothes had also changed. When Dudley went abroad for the first time, in 1661, the fashionable were still wearing stiff collars and tunics. All that changed on the day in October 1666 when Charles II ‘put ... himself solemnly into the eastern fashion of dress, changing doublet, stiff collar, [bands] & cloak &c into a comely vest after the Persian mode’. The wheel of fashion was beginning to spin faster. Women began to make up, ‘formerly’, as John Evelyn sniffed ‘a most ignominious thing, & used only by prostitutes’.2 The first fashion plates came out of Paris in the 1670s.

  The tide of Huguenot refugees, flooding into London throughout the 1680s, did much to accelerate this trend. France was, indeed, the arbiter of taste across Europe, and Louis XIV’s glory was exported not only by thundering artillery but by French manners, French clothes, even French food. Patrick Lamb had lavished all his skill on the coronation feast. Not good enough, apparently; weeks later a Frenchman, Claude Fourment, was promoted over his head. ‘Do but think how your quondam friend John, now fashionable Monsieur John,’ wrote John Locke from Paris in 1672, ‘abominated damned roastbeef and the other gross meats of England ... You will not deny me this privilege of my travels, to bring home with me the contempt of my country.’3

  Huguenots brought with them not only intimate knowledge of the latest French modes, but also of the techniques for producing them. In London, they settled either in Spitalfields or in Richard Frith’s Soho development, where houses were available close to the court, and where they were free from the guilds and jealousies of the City. The ‘Greek Church’* on the corner of Hog Lane was taken over for French services. In Soho the Huguenots manufactured boots and shoes, clocks and guns; they made clothes and wigs, introduced French tastes in alamode food and drink, sold perfumes, fans and furs. Fifty years later a visitor to Soho still found it ‘easy matter for a stranger to imagine himself in France’.4 So great was the ‘esteem for the workmanship of the French refugees’, thought one commentator, ‘that hardly anything vends without a Gallic name’.5 French styles (and Huguenot business sense) were even in demand, it transpired, 150 miles from St James’s. Jaques and Anne Elisabeth Fontaine started planning commercial ventures even as they sat down to their first meal in England, at the house of a kindly Barnstaple man. After moving to Taunton they opened a shop where they competed with more traditional neighbours by selling alicante raisins at a loss to bring in customers (who would ‘buy ten or twelve shillings of other goods, which would pay for the loss on the raisins’6). With true immigrant graft the former church minister and his wife stayed up all night picking off the stalks.

  ‘As to beaver hats, there were only two Frenchmen who knew how to make them at Exeter and they had promised not to sell them to anyone in my neighbourhood but me. I had undiluted French brandy from French merchants at Exeter, whereas the English dealers always played tricks with theirs.’7

  What this fashion revolution concealed, however, was not just growing wealth but growing choice. It was a revolution in possibilities. European tastes had suddenly become open to alternatives, and for that there was one overwhelming reason. It was not only London which was growing larger; the world itself was expanding.

  A volume of engravings had opened European eyes to the wider world beyond its own boundaries. It was first published in 1665, and its author, Johann Nieuhoff, had been secretary to a Dutch trade embassy to China. That embassy had made its journey as a result of a distant political earthquake. In 1644 the Ming dynasty had fallen, ending three centuries of Chinese isolation.

  For years the Ming curtain had allowed through only a trickle of rare porcelain, lacquer and silk, most of it fancifully decorated with travellers’ tales. The foundation of the Dutch and English East India Companies at the beginning of the seventeenth century had increased that trickle to a stream, but served only to whet European appetites for more. It was the Dutch (as usual) who were quickest to see the implications of Manchu success. Their delegation met the Emperor Shun Chih in 1656 and laid at his feet Europe’s new technological wonders: clocks, guns and mechanical toys. In trade terms they got little enough in return – for the moment. What they brought back, though, was something perhaps more important: the first glimpse of a new world.

  Johann Nieuhoff was an artist, and as the Dutchmen travelled from meeting to meeting and town to town, he sketched. He sketched the Forbidden City and the nine-storied porcelain pagoda of Nanking. He sketched everyday scenes as well: junks and sampans, Mandarins enjoying a picnic on a river. When Nieuhoff’s Travels* were published in the United Provinces in 1665, they caused a sensation. French, English and Latin editions quickly followed. In the Travels, readers looked beyond the borders of Europe and saw there an alternative world, a world as civilised as their own – perhaps more civilised – where people and clothes lo
oked different, where boats and buildings and furniture were constructed in a quite different way; a world which existed, somewhere, and was real and different from anything people in Europe knew.

  Samuel Pepys had his portrait painted in a borrowed Indian gown. John Evelyn visited a neighbour

  ‘whose whole house is a cabinet of all elegancies, especially Indian, [with a] contrivement of the Japan screens instead of wainscot in the hall ... the landskips of the screens representing the manner of living, & country of the Chinezes.’8

  Dudley North, in 1680, encountered a general fascination with details of life in other lands. Two Turks came to find him on the Exchange, and Dudley invited them home to demonstrate pilavs to Roger.†† Interiors were revolutionised. European furniture had barely been more than functional before. Luxury was signalled by heavy carving or the application of gilt or painted decoration. By contrast, Chinese interiors were airy and luxurious, and Chinese furniture seemed miraculously light yet strong. It was from Chinese craftsman that Europe learned the technology of strong joints which enabled chairs to be constructed around slender, elegant frames. Rough cupboards were turned into cabinets, bare rooms into luxurious closets furnished with stands and side-tables, porcelain vases, lacquered screens.

  Louis XIV melted down his silver furniture at Versailles to pay for his wars. His designers conceived new, elegant interiors as a replacement. Wealth was no longer weighed only in bullion or heavy textiles; it was expressed in style. The Huguenot Daniel Marot fled France in 1684 for the United Provinces. There he would design stunning new interiors for the palace William and Mary were building at Het Loo. Designers like Marot had a whole palette of new materials at their disposal, from silk and lacquer to exotic hardwoods. Chinese porcelain was stacked up in pyramids. Magpie-like, the Baroque, that amalgam of the flawed, the allusive, the complex and melodramatic, absorbed fantasies of Indian Queens, Oriental Princes and Roman Emperors. ‘Cathay’, India, Japan and all lands between blurred into a cabinet of curiosities, a vast and exotic ‘other’.