A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (19 page)

The Corporation Act was Charles’s first real defeat. He had gambled on the force of reasonable argument and had been defeated by the entrenched interests of the church, the vehemence of Sheldon and the deep-held suspicions of his parliament. His defeat did not, however, affect the Christmas revels. And at Whitehall at least, he could demonstrate that different modes of worship could be brought together peaceably. On 12 January 1662, the whole court trooped over to St James’s, where the famous Huguenot preacher Alexander Morus, who had taught in the Netherlands and in Geneva, ‘preached or rather harangued’ the court on the theme of ‘
all things operate for the best to those who love God, &c
’ in French, in front of the King and the Duke of York, the French ambassador ‘& a world of Roman Catholics’.
¹⁶

But still, at the start of the year Charles’s ministers were becoming anxious about the nonconformists’ response. In January, rumours of plots prompted Clarendon to suggest supplementing the local militia with special troops, to be led by the Duke of York. The very suggestion horrified the Commons, raising as it did the old spectre of a standing army which would give its commander power to rule without parliament.
¹⁷
The idea was dropped, but there was a hum of fear about what might happen next, among both dissenters and Anglicans. The mood was superstitious, ready for omens. On 13 February Charles’s aunt, the redoubtable Winter Queen, Elizabeth of Bohemia, died at Leicester House. Next day, St Valentine’s Day, saw gales and pouring rain, which swelled into a tempest to match the storms before Cromwell’s death. Because she and her husband had been swept from their throne by Catholic forces at the very start of the religious wars in Europe, Elizabeth had become almost a protestant martyr, the subject of many myths and stories. To the superstitious the gales that swept across all Europe, like the religious wars of the past, were linked to the passing of this Winter Queen. In Britain, several people were killed as roofs were ripped off, chimneys collapsed. Three thousand oak trees were toppled in the Forest of Dean, the vital nursery for the navy’s timber.
¹⁸
The London streets, wrote the merchant Thomas Rugg, were full of ‘brickbats, tileshards, spouts, sheets of lead…hats and feathers and periwigs’.
¹⁹
When Pepys set off the next day to join his wife and Sir William Penn at the opera he found his way blocked by broken bricks and tiles.

Holding their beaver hats and tugging at their wigs as they dashed to Westminster, the frightened MPs tried to push through a bill which would expel presbyterian ministers even before a full Act of Uniformity was passed. Knowing that the king and Clarendon would try to have this thrown out by the Lords – as eventually happened – on the eve of the Lords’ debate a Commons deputation went directly to Charles in a threatening mood. He reminded them that on his return he had promised these ministers that they could stay in their livings.

Whereupon they said the Commons might possibly, many of them, be tempted not to pass the bill intended for the enlarging of his revenue…to whom the king answered that if he had not wherewith to subsist two days, he would trust God Almighty’s providence, rather than break his word.
²⁰

Brave words, but Charles’s promises were already proving fragile. He told his presbyterian chaplains, for example, that the rituals in the old Book of Common Prayer would be adjusted to their liking, yet the previous autumn he had given the task of revision to the Canterbury Convocation, which, with the York Convocation, was one of the two elected assemblies of the Church of England. Within weeks they made six hundred changes. The new prayer book was sent for approval to the Lords in December, and was passed by the Commons in March 1662.
²¹

That month, Charles addressed the Commons in the Banqueting House. His position was difficult since, as the MPs’ deputation had implied, he needed their goodwill to get his money. In his address, after a heartfelt plea that they finally settle finances, he turned to religion. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘I hear you are very zealous for the Church, and very solicitous and even jealous that there is not expedition enough used in that affair.’
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He thanked them, drily, presuming this sprang from ‘a good root of piety and devotion’, and then tried to steer them away from rumours that his concern for nonconformists meant that he did not support the church: ‘I must tell you I have the worst luck in the world, if, after all the reproaches of being a Papist, whilst I was abroad, I am suspected of being a Presbyterian now I am come home.’ The new prayer book, he said, proved his good intentions, but, he warned them, ‘the well settling of that affair will require great prudence and discretion and the absence of all passion and precipitation.’

The warning went unheeded. On 19 May 1662, the very day that Charles was due to dash to Portsmouth to greet his Catholic queen, the
Act for the Uniformity of Publique Prayers and Administration of Sacraments
was finally passed. The act decreed that all ministers must be ordained by a bishop and must subscribe to the new prayer book and the Thirty-nine Articles, or quit their livings by St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August (the gap of time was to allow the prayer book to be printed and distributed).

There were already intimations of protests. In June the execution of Sir Henry Vane at the Tower drew vast crowds. However hard the officials tried to suppress Vane’s long speech – snatching his papers from his hands, and bringing trumpeters up under the scaffold to drown his voice – his brave words, justifying the cause he died for and praying for the good of the country, impressed all the witnesses. Soon a biography of Vane was published, with a laudatory sonnet by John Milton, which had been written ten years before, in 1652, when Vane was fighting in parliament for the separation of church and state. Nervous of uprisings, and unhappy at betraying his promises, Charles suggested to the Privy Council that the new act might be suspended for three months. Sheldon wrote angrily to Clarendon and told the Privy Council, in a blasting speech, that to suspend the act ‘would not only render the parliament cheap, and have influence upon all other laws, but in truth let in a visible confusion upon Church and State’.
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Sheldon made sure, too, that his views were widely aired: a virtual copy of his letter appeared in the government press,
Mercurius Publicus
(whose reach Charles underestimated, and rarely read). In late August, when Clarendon suggested that presbyterians should petition the king again, Sheldon leapt into action once more, ensuring that the Privy Council rejected their plea.

That August, too, the Commons passed the ‘Quaker Act’, which laid down that anyone who refused to swear an oath or who joined in a religious meeting with five or more others was liable to a fine of £5 or three months in prison. On a second offence this would rise to a £10 fine and six months’ gaol with hard labour, and on a third, to transportation. Because of their rejection of worldly oaths, no true Quaker could swear the oath demanded, and so unless they were prepared to pay fine after fine, they faced years of imprisonment. One estimate suggests that fifteen thousand Quakers were incarcerated and 450 died in prison.
²⁴
Many rotted in small country gaols, while others were packed into insanitary London prisons like Newgate, where the gaolers made money by granting privileges to those who could pay – meagre bedding, food, perhaps a window to let in some air – and crammed the others into the foul-smelling rooms of the ‘Common side’ where many died from disease. When Charles tried to soften the impact of this Act by issuing a proclamation for the release of Quakers awaiting trial in London, the Commons turned on him fiercely.

In his bid to deal with these issues sanely, Charles misjudged the strength of the bishops and the mood of his parliament, but not the mood of the dissenters themselves. He could see that although the Quakers defied the law, few threatened the state. Like Bunyan, and many nonconformists in this troubled time, the Quakers tried to turn their back on public quarrels. In 1660, quoting the words of Christ, ‘
My Kingdom is not of this World
,’ the Quaker leader George Fox had written, ‘my Weapons are
Spiritual, and not Carnal
, and with Carnal Weapons I do not fight…and I witnesse against all
Murtherous plots
, and such as would
imbrew the Nation in Blood
’.
²⁵
Such protestations did no good. In the view of the parliament and Privy Council, the dissenting sects posed a threat. Church and state were once more bonded together. The underlying drive of much of the legislation that would follow had little to do with doctrine, but everything to do with the premise, succinctly phrased later by Halifax, that ‘it is impossible for a Dissenter not to be a REBEL’.
²⁶

The legislation of 1662 and the acts that followed were backed up by assaults on freedom of expression. As soon as the Act of Uniformity was passed, Convocation sent out a letter to all parishes. Pastors, they suggested, should teach the doctrine of the Church of England with ‘modesty, gravity and candour’, concentrating on morality and avoiding controversial tenets of faith like predestination.
²
A royal proclamation also warned against extravagant preaching, ‘which has much heightened the disorders and continues to do so by the diligence of factious spirits who dispose them to jealousy of the government’. Preachers must not use sermons ‘to bound the authority of sovereigns or determine the difference between them and the people, nor to argue the deep points of election, reprobation, free will etc.’
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The Licensing Act of 1662 tried to shut down the nonconformists’ ability to spread their message in print, as well as from the pulpit. From now on, too, attempts were also made to control, or at least spy on, all kinds of meeting places, including taverns and coffee-houses. The Act’s full title made its political nature clear. It was the
Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets, and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses
, and it prohibited ‘the printing or importing of any books or pamphlets containing doctrines contrary to the principles of the Christian faith or to the doctrine of government or of governors in Church and State’.
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To ensure this, the Act reduced the number of presses. The roll of master printers was cut back from sixty to twenty, each master being allowed only two presses and two apprentices. In England, these were in London, Oxford and Cambridge, nowhere else.
⁵

The licensing of books, before they could be registered with the Stationers’ Company, was overseen by Roger L’Estrange, a veteran royalist journalist, notorious for his loathing of dissenters. After 1660, having overcome some suspicion from his accommodation with Cromwell, he became spokesman for the most rabid section of the Cavalier Parliament. In pamphlets like
Toleration Discuss’d
(1663), he refused to accept that presbyterians had played a role in the Restoration, blamed the nonconformists for the Civil War and argued for their suppression. Their printers, he claimed, corresponded in code and were in touch with exiles abroad. L’Estrange also set out to be the government’s voice. In 1663 he launched the
Intelligencer
, which appeared each Monday, and the
News
, on Thursdays. He was also appointed surveyor of the press, with authority to hunt out unlicensed books and illegal presses. (Bunyan, in
The Holy War
, portrayed him as ‘Mr Filth’.)

Though energetic, L’Estrange’s efforts were largely unsuccessful. Many unofficial printers continued to publish unlicensed books, and in 1668 L’Estrange himself counted thirty-three such presses in London alone.
⁶
But his campaign was potentially dangerous because he could use the common law, as well as the Licensing Act, to catch his prey. Any slight on the monarch, the government or the church, in manuscripts as well as published works, could be labelled as sedition, and authors and printers thus risked being tried under the Treason Act, which classified as an offence ‘all printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking, calculated to compass or devise the death, destruction, injury or restraint of the sovereign, or to deprive him of his style, honor, or kingly name’.
⁷
The penalty on conviction was death.

In 1662 Elizabeth Calvert was living with her husband Giles and their four children in a tenement at the sign of the Black-Spread-Eagle, among the booksellers around Ludgate Hill and St Paul’s. They had a shop on the street, a cellar below, four rooms above, and a little yard with an outside staircase and a privy. The shop had been a meeting place for radicals since the 1640s, and at the Restoration, when many printers fled into exile, the Calverts worked on. When Calvert and his former apprentice Thomas Brewster published a blatantly seditious book in support of the regicides,
The Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King’s Judges
, and joined other booksellers in issuing
The Phoenix
, prophesying the return of the Solemn League and Covenant, L’Estrange leapt into action.

Giles Calvert and Brewster were arrested, tried, and sentenced to the pillory and a spell in prison. (The presiding judge at their trial was Sir Robert Hyde, Clarendon’s cousin.) But Elizabeth carried on, printing the even more libellous
Annus Mirabilis, or The Year of Prodigies
, ‘prognosticating mischievous events to the King’. Such pamphlets had long been a staple of cheap literature, linked to a strain of Calvinism that deciphered the hand of God in wonders and calamities in the natural world and saw God’s providence in protecting England as a ‘godly nation’. In royalist sermons, the Restoration itself was often described as an example of providence, but the
Annus Mirabilis
collections implied the opposite. The freakish events, storms and omens were seen as judgements on the nation for restoring a corrupt monarchy and licentious court, and a message to the bishops and all who suppressed freedom of religion.
⁸
God disapproved, and was warning his people of disaster. As publisher of the latest pamphlet, Elizabeth Calvert was briefly imprisoned. But the
Annus Mirabilis
and
Prodigies
broadsheets continued to spawn copies however hard L’Estrange tried to stop them.
⁹

While Charles quarrelled with Catherine on their honeymoon and dealt with Barbara’s tantrums and tears, the tension surrounding religion began to weaken his grasp on the nation’s goodwill. At the end of June 1662 Pepys wrote anxiously in his diary:

This I take to be as bad a Juncture as ever I observed. The King and his new Queene minding their pleasures at Hampton Court. All people discontented; some that the King doth not gratify them enough; and the others, Fanatiques of all sorts, that the King doth take away their liberty of conscience; and the heighth of the Bishops, who I fear will ruin all again. They do much cry up the manner of Sir H. Vanes death, and he deserves it.
¹⁰

People also protested against the new Hearth Tax and said they would not pay it unless forced to. Anthony Wood summed up the mood: ‘This year a saying come up in London, “The Bishops get all, the Courtiers spend all, the Citizens pay for all, the King neglects all, and the Divills take all.”’
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As the summer wore on towards St Bartholomew’s Day, and the Corporation Act, Quaker Act and Licensing Acts were put into force, news of protests streamed into Whitehall, with reports of ‘riding in the night’ and secret hoards of gunpowder and arms. The royal guards were put on alert and with every rumour the troops pounced on the sects. Like any demonised minority, dissenters were always the favoured suspects: ‘almost anything was believed that was said against a Nonconformist,’ sighed Baxter.
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More sermons poured forth on obedience to the civil law, and on the dangers of ‘Phanatiques’ and papists.

In late August, the time for the implementation of the Act of Uniformity drew near. On the last Sunday that ministers could preach unless they used the new prayer book and renounced the covenant, Evelyn went to church. His vicar obediently read the prescribed prayer book and preached on ‘the necessity of obedience to
Christian Magistrates
, & especially
Kings
’. Platoons of guards were out in the City, noted Evelyn, expecting trouble.
¹³
On the road to Launceston during a tour of the West Country, Schellinks and his friends ‘met so many black-coats or parsons that we did not know what to make of it. Some smoked a little pipe on their horses, some hung their heads, some were cheerful, others looked very melancholic…all the preachers had come there to swear the Act.’
¹⁴
In the town, the inns were full. ‘The newly printed revised Book of Common Prayer had been sent the day before to our host and distributed, and he told us that there had been such a throng for it that they had almost torn his clothes off his back.’ Next morning, with the book in their hands, all the clergymen came out of their chambers like bees from a hive, to ride to their parishes.

A published collection of the Farewell Sermons of leading churchmen who lost their livings in August 1662, including Edmund Calamy and Richard Baxter

That Sunday, 24 August 1662, 936 parish ministers, including leading presbyterians and a third of the London clergy, left their parishes in the ‘Great Ejection’. With this exodus, roughly two thousand ministers had now left the Church of England since May 1660.
¹⁵
They could not even teach, since schoolmasters were also obliged to conform with this Act, and hundreds turned instead to farming or labouring, scraping by on near-starvation rations. Many of their pulpits remained silent, as Sheldon had promised to fill the empty livings with better ministers than those who left, but had grossly underestimated the numbers needed.

At the same time, a nervous Privy Council and parliament overestimated the numbers of dissenters, and the threat to order. In the provinces, county authorities kept the local militia under arms. Not surprisingly, in October, when government agents cajoled a tiny group of religious separatists among the London artisans into planning an ‘uprising’, the whole force of the law crashed down on them. According to the informant William Hill, the plot’s leader, a Smithfield knife-grinder who had once been a member of Cromwell’s Life Guards, had vowed that the ‘Rogues’ at Whitehall would all be slaughtered and he himself would kill the king, to save England from ‘the Tyranny of an Outlandish Dog’.
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The Dutch would help the rebels with ammunition and shipping, and a force of five hundred men would seize Windsor castle. The intermediary between the Windsor troops and the Londoners was Thomas Tong, a distiller and tobacco merchant. The unrealistic ‘Tong plot’ was whipped up from low mutterings to a full-blown storm by overzealous agents, while confusion grew among the conspirators themselves. In the end five men were executed. The repression increased, and the spies intensified their searches.

The religious settlement was even harder on the people of Scotland and Ireland.
¹⁷
In Scotland, Middleton pushed the Scottish council and parliament to reinstate the bishops, a policy to which the former Covenanter Lauderdale, the Secretary of State for Scotland, was utterly opposed. About a third of the clergy remained loyal to the covenant and refused to join the newly established church. Over the winter of 1662–3 tension escalated between Middleton and Lauderdale, and in May Charles replaced Middleton as commissioner with the young Earl of Rothes, who was firmly under Lauderdale’s thumb. But nothing could save the kirk – the bishops were in place and Scottish dissenters were harried, fined and imprisoned.

In Ireland too the episcopacy was restored: two archbishops and ten bishops were consecrated on a single day in January 1661 in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. But outside the church the majority of people were still Catholic, apart from a minority of Scots nonconformists in Ulster, and in 1649, when he made his agreement with the Catholic lords, Ormond had promised that they could follow their religion. The Irish parliament was stoutly against any such toleration, but Ormond tried to find a way by asking leading Catholics to draw up a statement, a ‘Remonstrance’, in 1661, which declared that all rulers were ‘God’s lieutenants’, whom all subjects were bound to obey, and no foreign power (in other words the Pope) could overrule a king in his own country. Twenty-one peers and many leading laymen signed, but only seventy out of the country’s two thousand priests. Five years later it was formally rejected at a meeting of the Catholic clergy. If they had signed, this could have been a step to legal toleration. As it was, Catholic worship was still technically outside the law, although the Remonstrance did succeed, in Ormond’s words, in separating the ‘quiet and unquiet spirits’, driving a wedge between moderates and militants.
¹⁸
And while the Irish parliament prohibited meetings by all separatist religious groups, in practice the authorities found it easier to accept the status quo, and tolerate the Catholics. This inevitably outraged the protestants, and the mood remained uneasy and fearful.

In England and Wales, Sheldon’s bishops and their allies held that the legislation restored the true church. To those cast out, however – to Baxter, Bunyan and thousands more – the church and the legislators were forwarding a reign of Antichrist, a time of lewdness, luxury and godlessness. They were enemies of the good, the poor and the pious. ‘Nebuchadnezzar will have his
Fiery-Furnace
and Daniel his
Lyon’s Den
for Nonconformists,’ wrote Bunyan.
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