James II and English Politics 1678-1688

Michael Mullett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134876501
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Michael Mullett reconsiders, in the light of recent r attlee's* and of altering perceptions of the English past, the events of the crucial years 1678-1688; from the Restoration era through the exclusion crisis, and subsequent reign of James to the `Glorious Revolution' of 1688. He focuses on the central role of James, Duke of York, and from 1685-1688, King of England, but locates the growing difficulties of his reign within the wider context of political and religious trends.

1
Introduction:
popery and politics

In 1688 King James II, like his brother and predecessor Charles II at his restoration to the throne in 1660, assumed the crown in circumstances of exceptional promise. The country was in the grip of a royalist reaction, and the parliament called for the new king’s accession reflected this mood. Two insurrections in 1685 had the effect of deepening a loyalist swing in James’s favour. However, less than four years later, James had thrown away all this bright legacy and was driven into abdication. His brother Charles had for the most part a difficult and at times stormy reign but had survived as monarch for twenty-five years and died a king. So how, in contrast with his royal brother, did James manage to terminate this own reign so abruptly?

The answer may lie in part in James’s character. As well as being dignified, soldierly and regal, he was humourless, arrogant, obstinate, sometimes cruel, hectoring, brusque and unintelligent. As with many of his Stuart family, James’s personality seems to have deteriorated as he grew older, and, as Dr Ashley wrote, the dashing soldier of his youth turned into the disagreeable prince of his middle years. However, in themselves the king’s character traits would not have brought about his downfall; indeed, many actually admired the kingliness of James’s imperious character. The real damage was done by the way that James II’s domineering nature in pursuit of radical policies aroused the most antagonistic complex of religious and political feelings in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen, the feelings summed up in the term ‘anti-popery’.

What, then, was this anti-popery, this set of values and prejudices that brought about the speedy demise of a king whose reign had begun so auspiciously? Anti-popery was a web of English political and religious attitudes to the Roman Catholic Church, its beliefs, practices and personnel. Suspicion of the papacy, the headship on earth of the Roman Catholic Church, was already ingrained in English attitudes even before the Reformation. The dissident Oxford theologian John Wyclif (d. 1384) had thundered out against the Roman papacy in works such as De Papa, Concerning the Pope. The fourteenth-century acts of parliament known as Praemunire and Provisors had severely restricted Rome’s rights over the Catholic Church in England. Hostility to the papacy’s intervention in English affairs, like hatred of the French, had in fact been an integral part of the nation’s self-discovery, of late-medieval England’s awakening nationalism.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century reinforced and gave doctrinal coherence to this accumulating anti-papalism. The pope himself became demonized into a figure of total depravity and cruelty, the ‘Antichrist’. John Foxe’s lengthy account of Catholic persecution of Protestants, The Actes and Monuments of the Church, universally known as the Book of Martyrs (first published in 1563 and regularly reprinted), formed a national history which confirmed the identification of English nationality with Protestantism and anti-popery.

On the more purely political level, Catholicism came to be regarded as highly objectionable. In Europe at large, Spain, England’s chief foe for much of the reign of Queen Elizabeth during the second half of the sixteenth century, was the principal standard bearer of the militant Catholic counter-offensive against Protestantism known as the Counter-Reformation. The pope himself was viewed as a despot and, in a country largely committed to the ideals of monarchy under the law, Catholicism appeared to be linked to, and to support, arbitrary and absolute government – tyranny, along the lines of what English people saw as the unchecked Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. The close connection between Catholicism and despotism and their combined insidious threat to English liberty was the theme of a work that captured the growing anti-popery of the 1670s, Andrew Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677).

‘Papists’, too, especially the powerful order of priests known as the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded in the sixteenth century, seemed pledged to a total Machiavellian ruthlessness in advancing the interests of the Roman Church, and appeared committed to the idea that the ends justify the means. Indeed, in the sixteenth century some Jesuit thinkers had developed the political theory of tyrannicide, according to which it was permissible to assassinate any ruler who stood in the way of the interests of the Catholic Church. This theory was seen as underlying acts of Catholic terrorism such as the notorious Gunpowder Conspiracy against James I of England in 1605 and it seemed to lend credibility to the allegation of a Catholic plot against England’s Protestant system in 1678. Whether in the form of structured state violence, as in the highly repressive Catholic reaction under England’s Queen Mary between 1553 and 1558, or in unofficial plots and deeds of blood, the Catholic campaign against Protestantism, above all against English Protestantism, was seen in English Protestant eyes as uniquely determined, cunning, malevolent and violent. To achieve their diabolical ends, papists had, it was widely believed, sown the seeds of civil war between Charles I and his subjects in 1642. And it was an Anglo-Protestant article of faith that the Romanists had set fire to London in the city’s great fire of 1666. After the fire itself and the terrible damage it did to Europe’s leading city, the diarist Samuel Pepys, not normally a credulous man, wrote of ‘apprehensions … of the rest of the city to be burned and the Papists to cut our throats’. Fears of Catholic menace were expressed in the clearest and most hysterical tones in a political pamphlet of 1679, An Appeal from the country to the city, …:

… fancy that amongst the distracted crowd you behold troops of Papists ravishing your wives and daughters, dashing your little children’s brains out against the walls, plundering your houses and cutting your own throats, by the name of heretic dogs …

Alongside such fears of Catholicism as a threat to English lives, property, national identity and distinctive political institutions, we must not overlook a deep loathing that existed for Catholicism as a religious system. England was, after all, a deeply committed Protestant society presided over by an unmistakably Protestant church and pledged to the doctrines of the Reformation which Catholics rejected out of hand. Catholics were believed to spurn the Bible, the bedrock of the Reformation. Their respect for images of Christ and the saints seemed tantamount to idolatry, and the high esteem in which they held Mary, Christ’s mother, seemed to suggest that they thought of her as divine. Their sacrament of confession of sins was seen as giving priests excessive moral and even sexual power over their clients, while Catholics’ belief that in the sacrament of holy communion they actually consumed Christ’s flesh struck many English people as little short of obscene; the Catholic Mass was officially identified as idolatrous. Catholics were also believed to abandon their rights of conscience and judgment to the pope and their priests.

However, though overwhelmingly Protestant, seventeeth-century England had a significant, though not large, Catholic community of about 1.5 per cent of the overall population; it was unevenly distributed around the country, with a particular pocket in Lancashire, and was relatively strong in the gentry and the peerage. It is noteworthy that these Catholics – recusants, as they were know legally – were not the main targets of mass violence in the episodic crises of anti-popery under Charles II and James II. There were deaths, it is true, between 1678 and 1681 in an epidemic of anti-Catholic feeling, but there was no holocaust. This was because the target on these occasions was popery, which was partly a fantasy or myth, rather than actual English Catholic neighbours. ‘Popery’ was seen essentially as a foreign thing, an international and French-led assault on Englishness. As we shall see, in 1688 James II awoke a fear of popery – of a great popish plot masterminded in Rome and Paris, carried out by barbarous Irish and directed, in characteristically ‘popish’ arbitrary fashion, against England’s religion, freedom and laws. That was why he fell.

2
The Popish Plot

The 1670s saw an intensification of English anti-popery. Louis XIV’s France, stridently Catholic, was on the march in Europe and was committing systematic aggression in the Low Countries, threatening the Protestant Dutch Republic. Though it was actually illegal to suggest that Charles II – the son of a Catholic mother, the husband of a Catholic – was a papist, suspicions were rife that the court was open to Romanist influences. Such suspicions seemed amply confirmed in 1673 when the heir presumptive, the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, was forced to resign the office of Lord High Admiral because of his refusal to comply with the new Test Act and abjure the Catholic doctrine of the Mass: James’s Catholicism was now public knowledge. The Duke’s highly unpopular Catholic marriage to the Italian Maria Beatrice of Modena in 1673 made his Catholic commitment even more obvious. Under the leadership of the foremost minister, the authoritarian-inclined Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Danby, the government seemed to be putting in place the militarist absolutism that was viewed as the necessary concomitant of ‘popery’. In these tense circumstances, in the late summer of 1678 stories of what appeared to be a ‘Popish Plot’ began to leak out, disclosed by Titus Oates and Israel Tonge.

Titus Oates (1649–1705) was an ordained minister who had taken service as chaplain to the Protestants in the Duke of Norfolk’s Catholic household, a highly useful opening since it brought him into the heart of the recusant community, providing him with insider knowledge which was to bring him fame and fortune in the years of his ascendancy as an ‘informer’. In 1677 Oates declared himself a Catholic. Plausibility was his stock in trade, and he managed so successfully to convince Catholic authorities of his sincerity that in 1677 he was admitted to the English College of Valladolid, a seminary for training priests. He was expelled but then managed to gain admission to the Jesuit academy at St Omers in Flanders. By now Oates knew enough about both the Catholic world and the Catholic underworld to present an apparently believable invention of a Catholic plot.

Oates’s partner, Israel Tonge (c. 1621–80), was a deranged cleric who dabbled in chemistry and made a living translating tracts by anti-Jesuit writers. In 1675 he was said to have heard of a plot to murder the king and replace him with James, and in 1676 he met Oates. In August 1678, using as an intermediary one Kirkby, a chemist known to the king through his own amateur interest in chemistry, Oates and Tonge were ready to present their story to Charles II.

The Oates-Tonge plot was a variant of the Catholic conspiracy genre that flourished in seventeenth-century England. Initially, Charles took little notice of this hackneyed testimony and left the matter in the hands of the privy council. In the original forty-three-clause deposition, James was not implicated – indeed, he, along with the king, was presented as the intended victim of a Catholic stratagem. But James was dragged into the plot when Oates, on 28 September, told the privy council that the papers of James’s former secretary, Edward Coleman, might yield up interesting information. With the search of Coleman’s lodgings, at the Earl of Danby’s proposal, Oates struck gold. The secretary, a Catholic convert, had been in correspondence in 1674–5 not only with Louis XIV’s confessor, Peère la Chaise, but also with the papal internuncio in Brussels, and in his letters, which the privy council began reading early in October, Coleman had rashly written to express his hopes to reverse the Reformation and reconvert England ‘which has for a long time been oppressed and miserably harassed with heresy and schism’. On 2 October parliament resumed and the investigation of Coleman was taken up. On 27 November he was tried for high treason and found guilty as charged. The Lord Chief Justice presiding summed up: ‘Mr Coleman, your own papers are enough to condemn you’ (though his ‘own papers’ did not condemn him of the specific plot alleged by Oates and Tonge) and he was executed on 3 December by hanging, drawing and quartering.

Was James implicated in Coleman’s machinations? John Miller writes that ‘Coleman’s letters placed [James] squarely in the centre’ of Oates’s plot; he suggests that the Duke had to struggle hard ‘to avoid being dragged down with’ Coleman, and was let off the hook by the House of Lords’ deferential preparedness to accept his word as a prince. F. C. Turner, James’s standard biographer, went even further and claimed that James was ‘sufficiently responsible for the content of Coleman’s letters to be seriously implicated in Coleman’s guilt’. A highly revealing letter from the Duke to Coleman’s correspondent Père la Chaise – and from the very same period when Coleman was involved in his manoeuvres – suggests that the secretary enjoyed York’s complete trust; the Duke refers to Coleman as ‘one of my family [household] in whom I have great confidence’. Fortunately for the Duke, such material was not available to parliament in the autumn of 1678. However, the Coleman scandal encouraged the belief that, for as long as James remained both a Catholic and heir presumptive, Catholic extremists such as Coleman, pinning their hopes on the Duke’s faith, would continue with their schemes, and that therefore, in part for his own good and certainly for the good of the nation, the Duke should be at least distanced from the king and perhaps cut off from the line of succession. Thus a kind of conservative movement against James grew up – or rather, not against James in person but designed to protect him, the king and the country from the consequences of his being Catholic in so far as his religion, whatever his own expressed wishes, encouraged Catholic extremists. Various members of parliament spoke of their ‘extreme veneration for the Duke’ but of their alarm at ‘his being next of blood to the succession of the crown, and what encouragement that may give the Papists to take away the King’ and of ‘the hopes the Papists have of the Duke’s religion’.

At this stage, then, a prevalent mood was one of seeing James, merely by being a Catholic, as innocently responsible, so to speak, for Catholic conspiracy. Yet people seemed to know that it was futile to try to de-convert the obstinate James. Thus it was coming to be perceived that all that could be done in terms of neutralizing the Duke’s passive menace as popish successor was to debar him from the succession. That was the genesis of ‘Exclusion’, though, as we shall see, some went beyond the position that the Duke was only a passive victim of a conspiracy going on around him without his consent.

The Coleman case was not the only sensational event of the autumn of 1678; another, which seemingly provided further proof of the limitless malevolence and violence of ‘papists’, was the mysterious death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Godfrey, a prosperous London timber merchant and Justice of the Peace, had played a hero’s role during the plague in London in 1665. As a magistrate, he was kindly disposed towards Nonconformists and easy on Catholics; his acquaintances included Edward Coleman. A tribute to him by the contemporary historian Bishop Gilbert Burnet brings out his tolerant spirit:

A zealous Protestant he was, and a true lover of the Church of England, but he had kind thoughts of the Nonconformists, was not forward to execute the laws against them, and, to avoid doing that, was not apt to search for priests or mass houses, so that few men of the like zeal lived on better terms with the Papists than he.

On 6 September 1678, in his capacity as a Justice of the Peace, Godfrey took down a sworn statement to the effect that information in the possession of Oates, Tonge and Kirkby was true. Then, towards the end of the month, Oates left with Godfrey a copy of his actual paper of information. Godfrey now seems to have realized that, as legal custodian of Oates’s testimony, he was in a highly exposed position and was supposed to have exclaimed, ‘Upon my conscience, I shall be the first martyr.’ Furthermore, Godfrey also held a long conversation with Edward Coleman and was reported to have found Oates ‘sworn and … perjured’ – though in testimony at his inquest it was alleged that Godfrey had ‘believed that surely there was a plot’.

At 9 o’clock on the morning of Saturday 12 October Godfrey left his Charing Cross home and was possibly seen several times during the course of the day, in or near the Strand. He then went missing for five days until, on the evening of 17 October, his body was found in a ditch on far-away Primrose Hill, near Hampstead.

An inquest was held the next day and went into considerable anatomical detail, as reported by a secretary of state:

Sir E. Godfrey.

The coroner came in and gave account of the view of the body. NB – The hilt of the sword was three inches from the ground. No blood near the place nor where the body was, none under the hilt of the sword. A bruise on the top of the breast just under the collar. A circle round his neck like those that are strangled… . His shoes, the soles extreme clean. No dry dirt on them. His body did stink. Faces [faeces?] redder than ordinary [?], therefore not dead of wounds, which would make them pale… . His neck turned all one way to the left. His eyes closed and his mouth. Extreme empty – therefore had not eaten in two days or more.

These are various forensic constructions we can put upon the coroner’s reports. One highly likely interpretation is that Godfrey was not stabbed to death. (Dead bodies do not bleed.) Some bruising, contortions around the neck and head and the absence of food in the cadaver may suggest some brutal treatment in captivity before death. There is clear evidence of strangulation, either by others or as a suicide by hanging. The death did not occur at the place of discovery of the corpse, and the body, which had expired some time before, probably at the weekend (‘his body did stink’), had been taken to Primrose Hill between Tuesday, when a visitor to the site had seen nothing untoward, and Thursday. Several circumstances pointed to a person or persons trying deliberately, if not always very knowledgeably or skilfully, to confuse any straightforward forensic investigation.

It is hardly surprising that Godrey’s death has aroused intense speculation on the part of historians and crime writers down to the present day. There are so many missing pieces in this jigsaw, so many conflicting statements, and anomalies like the Protestant magistrate’s friendship with the fanatical Catholic secretary, Coleman. A fascinating summary of the case can be read in the appendix to John Kenyon’s The Popish Plot (1972).

One possibility is that Godfrey, a melancholic, the balance of whose mind may have been tipped by receiving Oates’s testimony, committed suicide by hanging himself. He was a rich businessman and unmarried. As the law then sto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chronology of events
• 1. Introduction: popery and politics
• 2. The Popish Plot
• 3. Exclusion
• 4. The second restoration, 1681–5
• 5. ‘A man for arbitrary power’?: James II, 1685–7
• 6. The search for new allies: James II, 1687–8
• 7. James’s overthrow
• 8. Conclusion
• Select bibliography