A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (21 page)

On 26 December, taking advantage of the fact that Clarendon was laid low by gout and confined to his house in the bitter winter weather, and thus unable to argue against him, Charles issued the ‘Declaration to Tender Consciences’ that Manchester and his allies had concocted. This proposed that until a proper bill could be put before parliament, the king should use his royal prerogative and position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England to suspend the penalties on dissenters. For a fee, protestant nonconformists could apply for licences to worship publicly, and Catholics to conduct private services.

It was a bold move, ruined by a fatal lack of nerve. Charles added a proviso saying that he would issue no formal declaration without parliament’s consent. In February 1663, when the declaration was to be put forward as the basis for a bill, he put his case at Westminster. First, he objected personally to the severity of the laws. ‘The truth is’, he argued, ‘I am in my nature an enemy to all severity for Religion and Conscience, how mistaken soever it be, when it extend to capital and sanguinary punishments.’
¹⁴
Secondly, he suggested, rightly, that current policy was shortsighted and was provoking the very unrest the Commons feared, adding with regard to dissenters that he wished he had ‘such a power of indulgence, as might not needlessly force them out of the kingdom, or staying here, give them cause to conspire against the peace of it’.

This note of practical politics persuaded the Lords but stood no chance with the Commons. They refused to ratify the declaration, citing their fears that it would lead to Popery and increase the number of sectaries. The MPs were particularly outraged at the declaration’s openness to Catholics, although Charles explained that they were included because so many Catholic families had served his father and himself during the wars.
¹⁵
In May, when it was clear the bill would make no progress, Charles withdrew his declaration. The defeat was stinging, and discouraged him for a long time from attempting to modify and tone down the religious settlement.

He had played too high, laying down a card that many felt he had no right to hold. As well as opposing his stance of toleration, most MPs felt that he had exercised a royal prerogative in matters of religion that he could no longer claim. Even those who favoured greater tolerance had been worried by the implication that such a prerogative could sweep away statutes already on the books. It seemed that a king was once more claiming to be above parliament and the law. Clarendon, who had not openly opposed the declaration, was horrified. The power it granted to the crown was not specific, he said in a moment of frankness that he would afterwards bitterly regret, but so open and far-reaching that it recalled the actions of Charles I, when he tried to obtain ship-money without having parliament’s consent. This was a fatal slip, since it not only attacked Charles, but raised the spectre of the royal arrogance and parliamentary anger that had destroyed his father.

Knowing how much Clarendon’s remarks would gall Charles, Bennet and many others waited for the Chancellor’s dismissal. But annoyed though he was, Charles realised that his views were widely shared. This was not the time to make a move against him. Despite this, Clarendon felt the chill in Whitehall. By June he was almost in despair, confessing to Ormond that he was exhausted by his task: ‘the truth is, I am so broken with it that were it not for the hope of once more seeing you, & consulting together, and trying like good men what we can, I would Passyonately contrive the gettinge into some corner, and to be forgotten.’
¹⁶

One problem was, in Clarendon’s view, that in the three years since the parliament was elected, every time a seat fell vacant great pains were taken to ensure that it was filled with one of the courtiers or royal servants. The new MPs therefore felt they should take directions from the king himself, rather than from Clarendon. He had got used to ‘quietly managing’ parliament to vote the way he wanted it to, and was alarmed in the spring of 1663 to see that Bennet and Bristol, working with the MP Sir Richard Temple, were now trying to direct parliament themselves, with far less subtlety. When news of Bristol’s manoeuvrings got out, the House of Commons was furious at such interference from a member of the House of Lords, and Bristol was forced to make a public apology. Stung to the quick, he rounded on Clarendon.

George Digby, Earl of Bristol, painted by Van Dyck in romantic pose

Bristol was always likely to do something extreme, and the whole town ran with rumours. When Charles summoned him to explain himself, he was full of bluster and threats against the Chancellor. ‘The king stood all this time in confusion,’ as Clarendon described it, ‘that though he gave him more sharp words than were natural to him, he had not that presentness of mind (as he afterwards accused himself) as he ought to have had.’ In Clarendon’s view, which he put into Charles’s mouth, he ought to have called for the guard and sent him to the Tower.
¹⁷

Batting Charles’s angry objections aside, in July Bristol marched into the House of Lords and accused Clarendon of high treason. His grounds, absurdly, were that the Chancellor was furthering Popery, and that he had received bribes from the French for the sale of Dunkirk. Charles demanded to see Bristol’s speech and told him that it was seditious. But Bristol carried on, even though Clarendon’s son-in-law James told the Lords that the king disapproved and knew the charges were false. The matter was referred to the judges (all Clarendon appointees), who found the accusations absurd and threw them out. Bristol was banished from court and Charles ordered a warrant for his arrest. He fled, to spend the next three years in hiding. It was a blow for the faction around Barbara Castlemaine. Yet the public dislike of Clarendon was so great that three months after Bristol’s hysterical speech, the French ambassador the comte de Cominges reported that London crowds were seen drinking his health as ‘
le champion de la patrie
’.
¹⁸

Although Charles was angry with Bristol, Bennet and the others in the King Street set seemed exempt from his rage. In July, when Bristol was storming into the Lords, Charles granted new titles to Berkeley, creating him Baron Berkeley of Rathdowne and Viscount Fitzhardinge of Berehaven. (These were Irish titles like the Castlemaines’, by-passing the Privy Seal and the criticism of the Commons.) In parliament Bennet was building up support, helped by the Devon MP Thomas Clifford and William Coventry, the bluff, independent-minded secretary to the Duke of York and commissioner for the navy. Both these newcomers were roughly the same age as Charles – new, rising men.
¹⁹

CHARLES WAS RIGHT
to fear that unrest would flow from the new religious statutes. Sectarian pamphlets and republican broadsheets and almanacs multiplied, and in the summer of 1663 the Privy Council ordered the militia to ride into the countryside to break up conventicles, nonconformist meetings. One Wiltshire officer, William Levett, reported with pride to his colonel that his troop had ridden into Marlborough and ‘assaulted the burial place of the Quakers at Wanton and laid it waste’.
¹
In retaliation the outraged townsfolk stoned the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Herbert, as he rode through the town and he and his friends were forced to draw their swords and fire their pistols to disperse the crowd.

Everyone was on edge. Because the sects had been so active in the New Model Army, people muttered that former soldiers would rise up, as they had done recently in Ireland, and would join in a rebellion led by the regicides in hiding in Holland or by former parliamentarian generals. A well-organised plan to seize Dublin Castle was uncovered in June. This involved several members of the Irish parliament and army officers, including the self-proclaimed ‘Captain’ Thomas Blood, who later promoted himself to colonel and became famous for trying to steal the crown jewels. About fifty soldiers in the castle were ready to join them, having got arms and gunpowder out of the store, ‘by the folly of the storekeeper’s boy’.
²
The Dublin plot unnerved the authorities on the mainland. There were early hints too of a planned rebellion in the north, to be led by republican exiles, and the name of Edmund Ludlow, now living in Geneva, was mentioned as a leader (as it would be in every such scare until 1667).
³
Letters flew between Clarendon and Charles’s ambassador in the Hague, Sir George Downing, who had been Cromwell’s ambassador before, and knew the country well. Orangist supporters, gathering information with enthusiasm, plied him with details of religious and political exiles, including skilled artisans, merchants and former soldiers.

Charles and the Privy Council were used to rumours and to begin with they took them lightly. Bennet told Ormond that he was sure that rumour of the northern uprising was a false alarm, and Charles himself agreed. According to Clarendon, ‘the continual discourse of plots and insurrections had so wearied the king, that he even resolved to give no more countenance to any such informations, nor to trouble himself with enquiry into them’.
⁴
Instead, he said, he would leave the peace of the kingdom to the vigilance of the civil magistrates. But the intelligence from the north (much of it supplied by Bishop Cosin of Durham) was so persistent and persuasive that the militia was raised. According to government spies, a group of presbyterians and Anabaptists were planning to capture Whitehall and seize Clarendon, Monck and the Duke of York, in order to force Charles to carry out his Breda promises, and to abolish the hated Excise and the Hearth Tax.

In early August Buckingham, as Lieutenant of the West Riding, was sent to Yorkshire with a troop of horse, to round up the rebels. Most of the leaders were former republicans and army officers who had been part of the administration of the north during the Interregnum. Several fled to Holland and others turned informer, but in October the Deputy Lieutenant of the North Riding made eighty-eight arrests. A couple of nights later, small clusters of armed men gathered in Yorkshire and Westmorland, but dispersed when they realised they were not, as had been promised, part of a nationwide revolt. Buckingham helped to conduct their examination in York, ‘diverting himself at nights with his deputy lieutenants and officers, or dancing with the ladys, where hapnd many adventures’.
⁵

As Buckingham danced, delighted at the chance to get back into Charles’s good graces, the rebels, with supporters who had not taken up arms but had only talked of an uprising, lingered in gaol. In the end, after a series of trials, twenty-two were executed. After his fierce, though failed, efforts on behalf of the dissenters, Charles felt personally wounded by the rebellion, and urged the judges sent up from London to be severe. ‘It would very much conduce to the settlement of the public peace’, he told Sir Godfrey Copley in February 1664, ‘if more of those heinous offenders were made examples to deter others from the like mischievous practices.’
⁶
Roger L’Estrange magnified the revolt in the press, finding eager readers among hysterical Anglican royalists like the East India merchant Humphrey Gyfford. ‘Gag, crush and geld them’, Gyfford fumed, so ‘that in our generation they shall not be suffered to foment, scratch or bite and in good time that there may be no more of their breed, which God of his mercy grant.’
⁷

The Privy Council took fright, sending out arrest warrants for the remaining Commonwealth leaders who were still at large. The government also turned furiously against the unlicensed press. In October 1663 one of L’Estrange’s dawn raids found the printer John Twyn turning out copies of
A Treatise of the Execution of Justice
, a call to rebellion, citing biblical precedents and asserting the ‘godly duty’ to remove the ‘Bloody and Oppressing’ house of Stuart.
⁸
For this, and for an earlier tract against hereditary monarchy, Twyn was hanged, drawn and quartered, a horrendous punishment out of all proportion to his so-called crime. Two fellow printers were on the jury that convicted him. He argued, unsuccessfully, that he was merely the printer. He did not know the book’s content, and had simply agreed to print one thousand copies for the bookseller Giles Calvert because he needed the money. Calvert had died in August 1663 and Twyn had, he said, just sent the printed sheets to Calvert’s widow Elizabeth.

The ‘Confederate’ printers Thomas Brewster and Simon Dover and the bookbinder Nathan Brooks were also rounded up. Their trial was set for February 1664, at the same time as Twyn’s, but they were tried only for libel and not for treason. They were put in the pillory, charged heavy fines and sent to prison, where both printers later died of illness. Great crowds followed their funeral processions. Like Elizabeth Calvert, their widows worked on, loyal to the cause. (L’Estrange called Ann Brewster and another woman printer, Joan Darby, ‘a couple of the craftiest and most obstinate in the trade’.
⁹
) The Commonwealth sects had given women the freedom to speak out, and in the conspiracies of these years they were as active as the men, at least according to the informer John Ironmonger:

Designs are often carried on chiefly through women, some the wives of prisoners, who have access to their husbands’ fortune, have access to them, and to others on pretence of soliciting for them, and write in covert terms of trade or meet each other to convey intelligence &c. Secret meetings are often held at Channell’s, a milliner in Tower Street, also at Hackney, and at schools kept by matrons for young women.
¹⁰

The printers continued to supply the booksellers and all the country fairs. The Quakers, in particular, did not recognise the state’s right to suppress the written word, any more than they recognised its right to stop Quaker men – and women – from preaching. They organised the distribution of their publications centrally, and their printed works, letters and records created a sense of community that stretched across the land. They were not cowed by authority. The Quaker Charles Bayley, imprisoned in the Tower in the Plague Year, wrote directly to Charles,
The Causes of Gods Wrath Against England…in a Letter to the King.

One effect of the suppression of the sects was to make people look inward, to use ‘spiritual weapons’ not carnal ones, as Fox had said, to raise consciousness not to raise arms. Bunyan wrote, in his
Prison Meditations
, in 1665:

His spiritual autobiography,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
, appeared in 1666, and he worked on
Pilgrim’s Progress
in his Bedford gaol.
Paradise Lost
too is a work of this kind, offering to the fallen Adam, and to the poem’s reader, the prospect of ‘a paradise within thee, happier far’ than the lost Eden, to be attained through personal spiritual renewal.
¹²
This too could be a refuge for the soul in times of ‘heavie persecution’.

Boosted by their successes, the church establishment planned even harsher legislation. When the frail William Juxon, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in June 1663, his successor, inevitably, was Sheldon. Once in place, Sheldon set about gathering information by conducting a survey of all the dissenters in his diocese and issuing virulent propaganda against them. It was his view, often quoted, that only a resolute application of the law could cure the ‘disease’ of nonconformity. It was necessary, he declared, ‘that those who will not be governed as men by reason and persuasions should be governed as beasts by power and force, all other courses will be ineffectual, ever have been so, ever will be so’.
¹³

Sheldon had firmly opposed all Charles’s attempts to suspend or modify the laws. He now began drafting the Conventicles Act of 1664, which made it illegal for anyone over sixteen to attend a meeting of more than five people ‘under colour or pretence of any exercise of religion’ without using the Book of Common Prayer.
¹⁴
This time, remembering Yorkshire, Charles supported the Act and ensured it was fiercely implemented. By now the law against meetings was so strict that one man was imprisoned simply for reading printed sermons to friends at his own house: he begged to be released, ‘his family being numerous and his means small’.
¹⁵
Sheldon then took a further step, requiring his bishops to find out where ejected ministers lived, what they were doing, and how active they were in terms of a threat to church peace. This was in preparation for the Five Mile Act of 1665, which forbade the ejected ministers and schoolteachers to come within five miles of corporate towns, or the parish where they had formerly preached or taught.
¹⁶
This time, while a third of any fines collected went to the crown, and a third to the local corporation, a third was set aside for informers who had furthered the conviction, a new and insidious form of oppression.

The Five Mile Act was the last of the cluster of penal religious laws known as the Clarendon Code – unfairly, since Clarendon had many reservations about them. But the Lord Chancellor was the head of the legal system. And Clarendon was Sheldon’s old friend. Both had been members of the philosophical and literary circle who had met at Lord Falkland’s home, Great Tew, in the 1630s. Then they had been reformers, criticising the harshness of Laud, but now they were oppressors in their turn.

The application of the laws varied greatly from town to town, county to county. Not every Church of England priest followed the prayer book and puritan pastors often conformed on paper but not in practice, like Ralph Josselin in Essex, who managed to go without putting on a surplice or using the prayer book for many years. In some places, where a dissenter or former minister was charged with offences against the acts, the magistrates simply refused to prosecute, especially in corporations with a solid core of puritans: Bristol, Gloucester and Taunton in the west, Newcastle upon Tyne in the north, Canterbury and Dover in the south, and Norwich and Great Yarmouth in the east. In Great Yarmouth, the laws were strictly applied for the first four years, but after new bailiffs were elected dissenters began to meet again. In other towns, however, penalties were imposed harshly. In Bunyan’s small Bedford community, dissenting preachers went into hiding, or were resigned to going in and out of prison.

The Anglican establishment was not altogether repressive. An influential group of clergy, including several future bishops like John Wilkins, Edward Stillingfleet and John Tillotson, had supported comprehension and were sympathetic to moderate presbyterians. Wilkins, for example, advocated a religious life based not on dogma but on piety, works and tolerance. Known as the ‘Latitude-men’ in the 1650s and later dubbed Latitudinarians, they worked hard towards greater toleration later in the decade. Yet by then it was too late. Sheldon and his allies had created a schism between the established church and dissent that would never be healed, like the old rift between the church and the Catholics. The effects would be immense, not only in the assault on nonconformity but on the whole political, commercial and cultural life of the country for a century to come.