King Charles II (78 page)

It is clear from the reports of contemporaries that Halifax’s decision to oppose Exclusion proved crucial. Only Halifax had the trenchant style necessary to cut down Shaftesbury, capable of demonic leadership in such a cause. There was one particularly telling exchange. Shaftesbury suggested sarcastically that Halifax could not really believe the Duke to be a Catholic, since he ‘combated with such warmth’ their own reasonable precautions against the Duke’s Catholicism. To this Halifax riposted that of course he knew the Duke to be a Catholic. Since he feared the consequences of the Duke’s Catholicism, he had opposed the Declaration of Indulgence (which Shaftesbury had supported) and worked for the Triple Alliance (which Shaftesbury had worked against). At this Shaftesbury was ‘much disconcerted’.

Dryden afterwards paid tribute to Halifax’s influence: his

piercing wit and pregnant thought

Endued by nature and by learning taught

To move assemblies …

So much the weight of one brave man can do.

During the ten-hour debate Shaftesbury never got up to speak without Halifax answering him. The final verdict was that Halifax’s rapier was ‘too hard’ for Shaftesbury.

At the end of the day the Second Exclusion Bill was defeated by sixty-three votes to thirty. And so the issue of the succession was, unexpectedly to many, disastrously to not a few, settled for the time being in favour of the Catholic Duke, who represented
the old order as well as descent in the right line. As for Exclusion, another satiric couplet summed up its dismissal in lines not quite up to the level of Dryden, but pithy nonetheless:

Our Renowned Peerage will not have it so,

The Demi-Gods and Heroes thunder, No.
³⁵

1
It is now in the Pierpont Morgan Collection, New York, having been purchased from an unknown source in the present century.

‘Men ordinarily become more timid as they grow old; as for me, I shall be, on the contrary, bolder and firmer and I will not stain my life and reputation in the little time that perhaps remains for me to live.’

W
ith the defeat of the Second Exclusion Bill, it might appear that Charles
II
, that expert on the subject of survival, had survived yet again. To Sir John Reresby, on the eve of Christmas 1680, the King had never seemed more at his ease, his sang-froid never more marked. At his
couchée
, that semi-official gathering of an evening, Charles weighed in a humorous vein against the fallacy and emptiness of those who pretended to a greater degree of sanctity than their neighbours: they were most of them ‘Abominable Hypocrites’. Above all, as the King had told Reresby the previous month, he was aware of the need of sticking by his old friends, otherwise ‘I shall have no Body to stick by me.’
¹

Much of this must be regarded as whistling to keep the royal spirits up – as well as the spirits of those surrounding the royal person. The King’s real mood was better expressed a few months later at that classic confrontation, the Oxford Parliament, when he observed something along these lines: ‘Men ordinarily become more timid as they grow old; as for me, I shall be, on the contrary, bolder and firmer and I will not stain my life and reputation in the little time that perhaps remains for me to live.’
²
The deaths resulting from the Popish Plot, the persistent chicaneries (as he saw them) of the Whig opposition, the attacks
on his wife, mistress and ministers, had produced a new ‘Severity in his Disposition’.

James Welwood attributed this directly to the Catholic executions: and Welwood, although writing some time after the event, at the request of Mary of Orange (he was her physician), knew the Court gossip.
³
It is also possible that such severity had always been latent beneath the courageous forgiveness which Charles
II
displayed at the Restoration. But a more plausible case can be made for the fact that all the Stuarts became more conservative as they became older – those that survived to do so. James
I
, who died in his late fifties, certainly developed a kind of obstinacy very different from the dexterity he displayed as monarch of Scotland. It scarcely needs stressing that Charles
I
, who was executed at the age of forty-seven, had shown these tendencies; James Duke of York had been marked for his rigidity since his thirties. Charles
II
, a far more flexible character in every way, who had learnt in a hard school the value of pliancy, was nevertheless not quite immune from the same tendency.

The next few months constituted the greatest challenge yet to the King’s nerve. He discovered in the course of them that this new boldness, the boldness brought by age, led to triumph, not disaster. This result did not encourage the King to revert to his previous easy-going stance. The concept of ‘peace for his own time’ was abandoned since, like so many other attitudes of appeasement, it had manifestly failed.

The day after the defeat of the Exclusion Bill, Shaftesbury struck again. He still did not reckon himself to be totally overborne on the subject of the King’s successor. ‘Sick in health’, he was ‘yet in action nimble and busy as a body louse’.
⁴
If Monmouth’s chances had temporarily vanished beneath a hail of mockery from Halifax, then the other expedient (of divorce) could be resurrected. In the House of Lords the next day, Shaftesbury outlined another project ‘as the sole remaining chance of liberty, security and religion’. This was designed to separate the King from his existing Queen, and provide him with an opportunity for ‘a Protestant consort’, and thus leave the Crown to his legitimate issue.

This gained little support in the Lords. It also offered the King an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to his wife
publicly. That night he ostentatiously supped with the Queen, when he had been in the habit of supping with the Duchess of Portsmouth. And, even more ostentatiously, he took his post-prandial nap in the Queen’s chamber. It was a signal rebuke to Shaftesbury’s plans. Queen Catharine had been ill that autumn, her fragility producing the usual unattractive speculation about her possible successors, including some cold ‘northern princesses’ and the daughter of the Earl of Manchester. Now the King had made it clearer than ever that she could not be attacked with impunity.

His speech to Parliament on 15 December was one of bitterness and disappointment. He had not succeeded in obtaining those funds which would enable Tangier to be made secure; as he saw it, Parliament had preferred to concentrate on this perpetual bickering over his successor, while forgetting the wider issue. He had hoped for a united front; they had responded with dissension. He had given them assurances concerning religion and they had not responded with any kind of financial backing. ‘I should be glad to know from you,’ exclaimed the King, ‘as soon as may be, how far I shall be assisted by you, and what it is you desire from me.’
⁵

One further piece of Parliamentary presumption he ignored. During the autumn session the House of Commons had reacted to the King’s new treatment of the judiciary by asking for a change in the tenure of the judges – or else for some limitation to their powers. The King made no reference to this request. All the same, the mantle of royal protection could not be flung out much further than the King’s own circle. In January the House of Commons made a move towards the impeachment of Lord Chief Justice Scroggs (in the event, the House of Lords refused to take him into custody and then Parliament was prorogued). More serious was the move of the House of Commons against Lord Stafford.

The five Catholic lords were still languishing in the Tower of London, to which they had been committed two years before. Although various Catholic priests, mainly Jesuits, had been put to death, and others condemned, no trial had yet taken place of these far more prominent victims. Scaffolding had been erected
in May with a view to preparing Westminster Hall for such a magnificent public event. The mob, with its taste for gloating rhyme, had sung of the preparations beneath the windows of the imprisoned peers.

The death of one of the chief movers of the plot, Bedloe, in the summer of 1680, was a blow to the prosecution: it was not until the autumn of 1680 that it was decided by the House of Commons to move against Lord Stafford.

This particular peer was chosen because the witnesses against him had the greatest air of plausibility.
⁶
Thus the verdict of guilty which was given against him was in a sense justified by the evidence produced – except that it happened to be perjured evidence. Witnesses happily swore that Lord Stafford had bribed them to kill the King, that Oates had delivered to him a commission to act as Paymaster-General for the Pope’s Army, and so on and so forth.

The condemnation of this decent and harmless old man was a blot on the age in which he lived. Already the ridiculous ‘Pumpkin Plot’, as it would be described satirically two years later in Otway’s masterpiece
Venice Preserv’d
, was beginning to be revealed for what it was: ‘It is indeed a Pumpkin-plot, which, just as it was mellow, we have gathered, and now we have gathered it, prepared it and dressed it, shall we throw it like a pickled cucumber out of the window?’ But in his prologue Otway spoke more soberly of the period of suspicion through which he had lived:

In these distracted times, when each man dreads

The bloody stratagems of busy heads;

When we have feared three years we know not what,

Till witnesses begin to die o’ the rot.

It was thanks to the ‘bloody stratagems of busy heads’ that, while the pampered Protestant ladies shivered in their coaches, Lord Stafford was executed on 29 December.
^fn1

His fellow lords remained in prison for the next five years, with the exception of Lord Petre, who was released earlier by death. But there were no cheers from the crowd when Lord Stafford’s head was held up by his executioner. The publication of his affecting last speech, the ‘Brief and Impartial Account’ (which was, unusually, not forbidden), brought further waves of uneasy sympathy. ‘My good Child,’ so Lord Stafford addressed his daughter Delphina, ‘this is the last time I shall write unto you, I pray God bless you. Your poor old Father hath this Comfort, that he is totally innocent of what he is accused of, and confident of God’s mercy….’
⁷

Charles
II
told Thomas Bruce that Lord Stafford’s blood was on the heads of those who had brought about his murder – ‘I sign with tears in my eyes’; and he made clear his anger and disgust at those peers who had voted guilty, especially those whom he considered to be supporters of the Court.
⁸
But he did not reprieve Stafford, as he would later fail to reprieve Oliver Plunkett. He could only remit the more extreme penalties for treason, including the traditional and disgusting mutilation – and even this merciful remission was criticized by the House of Commons, who wondered whether the sovereign had the right to grant it.

Then, on 18 January, the King dissolved Parliament and announced that the next Parliament would meet in March – and in Oxford.

It was an audacious move. It indicated that the King was at last prepared to take the initiative. Even before this, the Crown was at last mounting some kind of propaganda campaign, equivalent to the agile manoeuvres of Shaftesbury and his associates.
^fn2
The anti-Tory Green Ribbon Club had after all proved itself to be a more dangerous enemy than the anti-Popish mob. Noise merely
battered the ears; propaganda wooed them. The point was there to be taken. There were the efforts of Roger L’Estrange in particular. Certainly the new Parliament turned out to be no
more
Whig in complexion than the previous one, and possibly slightly less – a notable improvement on the record of the previous two years, when each successive Parliament had marked a further setback for the King’s party. Against this background, the choice of Oxford, whose University was a secure Royalist nursery, was inspired. Here was no London mob, hostile to so many of the King’s entourage. Perhaps the setting was the suggestion of Danby, for although still immured in the Tower, he was now able to receive visits and thus proffer advice. Eighteen months before he had proposed: ‘Parliament to be called to some other place; the King to reside out of London’, in a memorandum.
¹⁰