Exclusion Crisis

9 Key excerpts on "Exclusion Crisis"

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  Revolution by Degrees

  James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century

  • J. Rudolph(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The movement to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from his accession to the English throne is one such expression of the continued controversy surrounding these issues, and the Exclu- sion Crisis of 1679–81 has long been recognized as a significant event in the development of Whig ideology and the emergence of early political parties. 3 Contemporary scholars have also surveyed the whole of the Restoration period, and the series of ‘crises’ that shaped English politics in the 1660s and 1670s. 4 The unsettled nature of the Restoration Settlement has been emphasized, as historians have focused on continuities between the religious and political struggles of the 1640s and 1650s, and the political crises of the later Stuart period. This attention to the whole of the later Stuart period is crucial for the analysis of the process by which political parties formed, yet the Exclusion Crisis may still be regarded as having special significance for the development of a Whig theory of politics and resistance. The early 1680s were a turning point: although there is continuity between the arguments of these first Whigs and the theories of their predecessors, the debate over Exclusion translated the problems and ideas of the 1640s and 1650s into a new Restor- ation context, and particularly focused on questions of succession and ancient constitution. The terms of debate were forged in the late 1670s and 1680s, and these languages of patriarchalism, English history and contract would shape the arguments and explanations offered after 1688. The difference between Exclusion and the Revolution of 1688, between exhortation and justification, should not, however, be underestimated. This difference has often been noted in discussions of the Exclusion context of Locke’s Two Treatises and the disjunction between his early 1680s ‘radicalism’ and the more moderate Whig defense of Revolution after 1688.

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  This England

  Essays on the English nation and Commonwealth in the sixteenth century

  • Patrick Collinson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  My title needs to be explained, and perhaps defended. By ‘the Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis’ I refer to the sustained concern of much of the ‘political nation’ in the reign of Elizabeth I to forestall the accession to the English crown of Mary Queen of Scots; and, indeed, to prevent any other remedy for the dangerous vacuum of an uncertain succession which would threaten the Protestant religious and political settlement and all that it stood for. These contingencies included a royal marriage to a foreign Catholic prince, and in particular to the French duke of Anjou, the last to tango with Elizabeth, in the late 1570s. The formulation ‘Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis’ is not canonical and may not catch on. It is a question whether a crisis can endure for as many as twenty-seven years, which was the time it took finally to put paid to Mary Stuart’s claim in that bloody drawing room at Fotheringhay. (Was the forty-five-year Cold War a ‘crisis’?) But historians do speak of an Elizabethan succession problem, often distinguishing between an ‘early’ (1560s) and ‘late’ (1590s) succession problem. But in truth this was a problem which lasted the entirety of Elizabeth’s reign, exactly the length of the Cold War, only finding a final solution at the moment of her death in 1603. As with the Cold War, the fact that the Exclusion Crisis ended with less of a bang than a whimper has discouraged the legitimate exercise of counterfactual history. For the might-have-beens of the past have their own lessons to tell about the capacities of former societies.

  ‘Exclusion Crisis’ is filched from the inflamed politics of a full century later, the period from 1677–83, which Restoration historians have supposed to have centred on a campaign to exclude from the succession James, duke of York, the brother of Charles II, who had made public his conversion to Catholicism in 1673.1 It may seem perverse to invent an Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis at the very moment when Dr Jonathan Scott invites us to abandon the traditional fixation on a supposed Exclusion Crisis in the reign of Charles II, ‘an historical invention’, he tells us. Instead, we should think of the Restoration crisis, an affair concerned more with the politics of the present under the merry but treacherous monarch than with apprehensions about the future, its content and concern summed up in the title of a famous pamphlet by Andrew Marvell, published in 1677: The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government . Concern about the succession was only a part of these fears, and exclusion of the future James II only one of several possible solutions to the problem. So to speak of an Exclusion Crisis is to define a greater whole in respect of only one of its parts; in Scott’s vivid image to dwell upon the horn of the rhinoceros while ignoring the charging beast itself.2

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  Competing Visions of Empire

  Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire

  • Abigail L. Swingen(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  From 1679 to 1681 , the House of Commons tried on three occasions to pass a bill that would have excluded York or any Catholic from taking the throne. Exclusionists, who gener-ally became known as Whigs, were unsuccessful in their efforts. But the unstable political environment generated by Exclusionist Whigs and their anti-Exclusionist Tory opponents had far-reaching consequences. 3 Many scholars have main-tained that the Exclusion Crisis was not simply about removing York from the succession, but that it was a divisive ideological crisis of confidence in Charles II and his government. 4 Most important, the crisis was understood as a serious threat to the regime by the Stuarts and their allies. Therefore in 1679 fear of rebellion at home and in the colonies on the part of the Crown was very real. Colonial governors failing to follow orders threatened to undermine the integrity of the empire and the prerogative authority upon which it was based. This chapter explores the imperial implications of the Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath. The period began with the Crown on the offensive, continuing its assault on colonial autonomy that had been initiated by the Lords of Trade in 1675 . But the Exclusion Crisis greatly weakened the government’s ability to govern the colonies effectively. This reflected the inherent connections between domestic and imperial affairs as the crisis reverberated across the Atlantic. The Royal African Company’s authority and influence was significantly undermined by the unpleasant focus on its governor the Duke of York, who spent much of the crisis in exile. But the Crown and company also learned from this moment of weakness, and in the aftermath of Exclusion both emerged stronger than Exclusion, Tory Ascendancy, and English Empire 110 ever.

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  Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture

  Britain and Ireland, 1660-1714

  • George Southcombe, Grant Tapsell(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  He does not deny that there was a ‘crisis’ in this period, but questions whether the issue of ‘Exclusion’ was really central to it. For Scott this crisis was not so much about who succeeded to the throne after the death of Charles II, but how the later Stuart monarchy used its prerogative powers, as much in contemporaries’ here and now as in their distant future. 5 This, then, was a particular part of the longer term ‘crisis of parliaments’ in the early modern period, one in which MPs and peers self-consciously sought to protect their present status and future existence. 6 This view of a ‘Restoration crisis’ found qualified, but immensely detailed, support in Mark Knights’ reading of the polemical discussion and understanding of the political situation throughout England. What MPs and constituents clashed so vigorously about was a range of issues subsumed under the shorthand title particularly associated with the politician–poet Andrew Marvell: ‘popery and arbitrary government’. 7 Although far from unimportant, ‘exclusion’ in these accounts becomes one part of a much wider political and religious jigsaw. 8 A third challenge to older scholars’ focus on the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ has emerged from a large-scale shift in the historiography of the Restoration period. As late as the mid 1980s there was a general view that the Restoration period was less interesting than the early Stuart period, partly because there seemed to be fewer overt crises. That was what made the Exclusion Crisis so striking. It was the exception to an emerging picture of ‘political stability’ that would be given shape by the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath. 9 But recent researches – notably those by Gary De Krey – have identified numerous Restoration crises: crises about conscience and counsel in the mid and late 1660s, about prerogative power and religious settlement in the early to mid 1670s, and about standing armies in the 1690s

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  Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683

  • John Spurr(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  56 Shaftesbury’s real opinions about the merits of exclusion remain elusive. It is difficult to be convinced that he was in favour of the succession of the Duke of Monmouth, or that he believed that the divorce of the King or the promotion of an Association would restore harmony and stability to a troubled nation. At the same time, it might be thought to be a somewhat drastic step for historians to jettison the phrase ‘the Exclusion Crisis’ altogether. The proposals for exclusion were a striking development in the context of late seventeenth-century England. The contrast with the widespread expressions of loyalty to the Stuart monarchy at the Restoration only twenty years earlier is hard to overlook. Moreover, James did find himself excluded from the throne eventually, as a consequence of events defined by another phrase which historians may find inappropriate and which they may come to dislike, but which it is easier to accept than to reject, simply because of its familiarity: the so-called ‘Glorious’ Revolution.

  1 Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714 , ed. George de F. Lord (New Haven, CT, 1975), pp. 219–21, 303–29; K.H.D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), pp. 213–14.

  2 Memoirs of Sir John Reresby , ed. A. Browning (2nd edn rev. William A. Speck and Mary K. Geiter, London, 1991), pp. 227, 233; The Correspondence of the Hatton Family , ed. E.M. Thompson (2 vols, London: Camden Society, new series, 22, 23, 1878), II, 8; The Entring Book of Roger Morrice , ed. M. Goldie et al. (6 vols, Woodbridge, 2007), II, 295–6; HMC, Ormonde MSS, new series VI, 182.

  3 Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time , ed. Osmund Airy (2 vols, Oxford, 1897–1900), II, 351.

  4 Tacitus, Histories , I, 49.

  5 A Supplement to Burnet’s History of My Own Time , ed. Helen C. Foxcroft (Oxford, 1902), p. 58.

  6 Robert Halstead, Succinct Genealogies … [of the Noble and Ancient Houses of … Mordaunt of Turvey …] (London, 1685), pp. 432–3.

  7 Roger North, Examen: or, an Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (London, 1740), p. 119 (second pagination).

  8 Supplement to Burnet’s History , p. 59.

  9 Haley, Shaftesbury , p. 736.

  10 Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury

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  Mary Tudor

  Old and New Perspectives

  • Susan Doran, Thomas S. Freeman(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  16 Crowley established the basic contours of how the Mar-ian succession crisis would be described in Elizabethan historiography, even if the stresses would be slightly differently distributed in abridge-ments by Grafton, Cooper and Stow and major projects such as Holinshed’s Chronicles . 17 Stow, for one, avoided Crowley’s providen-tialism. By contrast, Foxe in the Acts and Monuments de-emphasized the illegitimacy of Edward’s plan and instead highlighted its potential benefits. At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, the relevance of the 1553 Exclusion Crisis to the nation’s collective concerns appeared slight. Elizabeth was widely expected (and urged) to marry and procreate, and in the meantime, to regulate the order of succession by statute. But by 1561–2 the situation changed radically in the aftermath of three events: the return to Scotland of the principal dynastic claimant Mary Stuart; the revelation of the Suffolk claimant Katherine Grey’s mar-riage to the earl of Hertford and her resultant pregnancy (both in August 1561); and Elizabeth’s nearly fatal brush with smallpox in October 1562. The outcome was what Patrick Collinson has dubbed the Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis: the recurrent attempts to secure the Protestant religion by barring, through statute, the Catholic Mary Stuart from the succession, and the corresponding attempts made early in the reign to persuade Elizabeth to recognize as heir the Protestant Katherine Grey. 18 Paulina Kewes 53 Militant Protestant opponents of Mary Stuart repeatedly stressed that her advent would spell a return to popish tyranny akin to that perpetrated by her Tudor namesake. Yet the advocates of exclusion were careful not to draw parallels between the measures they were proposing and the illegal bid to exclude Mary (and Elizabeth) Tudor that Edward and Northumberland had sought to effect back in 1553.

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  How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage

  Power and Succession in the History Plays

  • Peter Lake(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  58 (vi) The Essexian project Collinson’s notion of the Exclusion Crisis was organised around the threat of Mary Stuart, and one might be tempted to assume that with Mary’s demise the ‘crisis’ would go away. But that was far from the case. After all, for all that Mary’s son, James VI, was a protestant, the succession remained unsettled, and thus a subject for speculation, intrigue and anxiety. Not only that, but the dynamics of ‘the Exclusion Crisis’ might be thought to have had a positively integrative effect on the inner workings of the Elizabethan regime, serving to unite the major players against the spectre of a Marian accession. Thus, the removal of the imme-diate Marian threat freed up the succession issue to operate in far less unifying ways, as different groups and individuals started to jockey for position in advance of what was now taken to be the imminent death of the queen, with the succes-sion still unsettled and the identity of the succeeding monarch, and thus the character of the next regime, both threateningly unclear. The situation was exac-erbated by the removal by the Grim Reaper of most of the central pillars of the Elizabethan establishment, who began to die with alarming regularity in the late 1580s. By the early 1590s, with Walsingham, Leicester, Warwick, Mildmay and Hatton all gone, Burghley was almost the last surviving member of the governing clique that had dominated the high Elizabethan period. Indeed with the excep-tion of Hatton, who rose to prominence in the later 1570s, that group had been together since the 1560s, and their dispersal now, almost at a stroke – at a moment when the issue of the succession was rendered increasingly pressing by the advancing years of the queen, and the war with Spain was reaching a crisis point – occasioned a good deal of anxiety and no little conflict.

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  James II and the First Modern Revolution

  The End of Absolute Monarchy

  • John Van Der Kiste(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword History

    (Publisher)

  Coleman was sentenced to death, and despite hoping until the last moment that the Duke of York would be able to obtain him a reprieve, he was hanged at Tyburn in December. The likelihood of the accession of a Catholic to the English throne led members of both Houses of Parliament to try and prevent the Duke of York from ever becoming king. For several years, fears of a popish successor had been rife, but some had refrained from speaking too openly out of respect to the royal family. These new revelations freed many from such restraint. Abortive attempts to pass an Exclusion Bill were made in three successive parliaments between 1679 and 1681, giving rise to what became known as the Exclusion Crisis. This forced James’s supporters onto the defensive, and some of them urged him to save his position, if not his conscience, by completely renouncing the Catholic faith. On 21 February 1679 the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and the Bishop of Winchester, George Morley, had a private meeting with the Duke of York at St James’s Palace. They begged him to leave the Church of Rome and return to the Church of England, or in their words, to ‘recover the Duke out of that foul apostasy into which the bust traitors of Rome have seduced him’. 3 He received them politely and listened to their arguments, but remained obdurate. Within less than twenty years of the Restoration, James had made himself the most distrusted man in the country. By publicly embracing James II and the First Modern Revolution 56 the Roman Catholic faith, he committed what seemed the greatest of all political blunders in an age when Catholicism, or popery, was hated and feared by the ordinary Englishman, and had become a divisive presence. The king, who was still too cautious to give any indication of his own Catholic leanings, tried to persuade him to keep his religious convictions to himself, but James, his passion matched only by his complete lack of diplomacy, would not listen.

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  Politics under the Later Stuarts

  Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660-1715

  • Tim Harris(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  81 The government had even been prepared to offer additional legal safeguards in the advent of a popish King, but these had been rejected by the exclusionists.

  This Tory stress on the security given to the Protestant religion by Acts of Parliament is worth emphasising, since it is the Whigs who are usually regarded as the champions of Parliament during the Exclusion Crisis. Did not the Tories show themselves in many respects to be enemies of Parliament? The Tories certainly denied the Whig principle of co-ordination, that the King shared his powers with the Lords and Commons: it was ‘a breach upon the best Constitution of Government in the World’, to assert that ‘the soveraign Power lieth in the Commons’.82 They rejected the theory of the ancient constitution, and defended the King’s prerogative power of determining the sitting of Parliament. As the Cambridge scholar, Dr Robert Brady, was to show, Parliaments were created by the Crown in the late-medieval period, and had historically always been dependent upon the Crown for their sitting; the were therefore subordinate to the King, who alone was sovereign.83 Yet most Tories were not against Parliaments per se ; they were just against Whig-dominated Parliaments. What the Tories wanted, as John Verney wrote in July 1679, at the time of the dissolution of the first Exclusion Parliament, was ‘an honest Church of England Parliament’.84 In his Declaration issued in April 1681, explaining why he had dissolved the previous two Parliaments, Charles II expressed his resolve ‘to have frequent Parliaments’, and although he did not in fact fulfil this promise, he clearly recognised that it was something which, not only his opponents, but also his supporters wanted to hear.85 As one Tory newspaper put it at the same time, ‘I hope we shall have a Parliament yet that will heal all’.86 One pamphleteer claimed he desired ‘as heartily as any one in England, the frequent Meetings of Parliament’, though he cautioned that ‘experience tells us, That Parliaments may Erre as well as Kings’.87 Tories continued to hope for a Parliament well into the period of the Tory Reaction which followed the defeat of Exclusion. In January 1683 one correspondent, commenting how the situation in London was much better now than it had been for a long time, concluded by saying ‘we want only A Parliament that we may trust’.88

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