The Great Turning Points of British History (17 page)

A grimmer kind of theatre was enacted at Tyburn, where the procession of regicides dragged there to be half-hanged, eviscerated and cut into pieces was completed. The Restoration made an example of those who took part in Charles I’s trial and execution but passed a wide-ranging indemnity that protected everyone else from prosecution for what they had done over the past twenty years.

But a series of parliamentary acts revealed an ongoing neurosis: in late 1661 an Act ‘against tumultuous petitioning’ required all but the humblest petitions to be initiated by justices of the peace and grand juries at quarter sessions; the 1662 Licensing Act brought in a tougher regime for the control of the press than had existed even before the Revolution – one of its results was effectively to drive newspapers off the streets for most of the next thirty years. Later in 1662, an Act ‘for the relief of the poor’ allowed local officials to remove forcibly all newcomers from a parish if they were ‘likely to be chargeable’ to the poor rate and to return them to their previous place of residence. This was motivated as much by fear of sedition as of vagrancy.

For the better off, 1662 was a good year. The shops were full of goods, the king’s wife introduced the English to tea and the Great Turk coffee house opened in London. In 1662 what Pepys called ‘the college of virtuosos’ (the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) was established by royal charter, and its meetings were one of the few things to distract the king from pleasures of the chase (human and animal). In 1662, Isaac Newton was in his first year at Cambridge, but Christopher Wren was designing weather-clocks, and Robert Boyle was announcing his discovery about the inverse relationship of volume and pressure in gases. In Derby John Flamsteed, later to be the first astronomer royal, made his first-ever recording of the partial solar eclipse.

Internationally, 1662 was a quiet year. There was no European war, although the Chinese seized Formosa (Taiwan) from the Dutch. Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess on 3 May, bringing Bombay and Tangier as part of her dowry. To cover some of the costs of setting her up with an appropriate household, Charles sold Dunkirk, occupied by Cromwell’s troops, back to France for £400,000.

In 1660, Charles II had made it clear that he wanted an inclusive settlement. He gave more office, more patronage and more financial rewards to his father’s enemies than to his father’s friends: his friends would not send him on his travels again. He attempted to achieve this breadth in both secular and religious affairs; but he succeeded only in the former. The forces of religious reaction were too strong for him, and in 1662, legislation was passed in each of his kingdoms privileging those who embraced the spirit of the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlements. In England, the 1662 Act of Uniformity restored a Church both Catholic and Reformed, which looked Catholic and sounded Protestant, with a prayer book little changed from that of Elizabeth, with lordly bishops in their medieval palaces.

Membership of this state Church was made mandatory, with fines and other minor penalties on those who would not attend; and with heavier penalties on those who tried to worship, even in private, according to their experience and conscience. For the next two hundred years, the position in English law was that only communicating members of the Church of England could hold public office, or attend university or an inn of court. Charles had wanted to loosen up the terms of membership of his national Church, believing persecution would breed far more sedition than tolerating separation would. But since he never relished a fight, and since his Parliament and many of his advisers were adamant that the Church needed to be true to its pre-war traditions and that tolerance would allow sedition to fester, he gave in.

As a result, more than one in ten of the clergy resigned, and a similar proportion of layfolk opted out of regular church attendance and into attendance at conventicles – meetings of dissenters for worship. This created a fundamental instability in English political culture: between those who believed that monarchy needed to be underpinned by a hierarchical, narrow, national Church; and those who wanted a different kind of national Church or no national Church at all. In time, these tensions congealed into the two great parties: Tory (strong Church equals strong monarchy equals security of life and property); and Whig (religious pluralism as a hallmark of personal liberty as a hallmark of economic and social prosperity).

Much the same happened in Scotland. A ruined nobility were more ruthless in reclaiming social power and happy to see the power of the Kirk broken and its ministers humbled, and a settlement made that was both erastian (advocating the doctrine of state supremacy over the Church in ecclesiastical affairs) and episcopalian (governed by bishops). The purge on the uncompromising led in 1662 to the expulsion of one third of the clergy. Such men remained convinced they were instruments of God’s will; this made them more seditious than English dissenters. The more seditious they became, the more brutal the reactions of the Scottish establishment; a dark era of torture, massacre, assassination and fanaticism ensued. In 1689 the Revolution in Scotland was not to be the peaceful fudge that it was in England, but violent, counter-vindictive and partisan.

In Ireland, too, religion was the crunch issue. There was spasmodic persecution of Catholic clergy, but little attempt to compel ordinary Catholics to attend Protestant worship, let alone to convert them. But the big problem was land. In England and Scotland, compromises between the purchasers of confiscated land were usually possible (the purchasers of the land surrendering the title but staying on as tenants on low rents), but in Ireland the problem was unmanageable. More than 40 per cent of the land of Ireland had been confiscated and redistributed to those who had bankrolled English armies to put down the Irish rebellion of 1641 and to 30,000 soldiers who had effected the reconquest. In Ireland, unlike the king’s other kingdoms, in 1662 those confiscations were deemed legal. Charles II promised in 1660 to restore those who had not been directly implicated in the massacres of 1641 and who had supported his lord lieutenant against the Parliamentarians. He also promised to compensate those who had to surrender land to that group.

These were unrealizable promises. In 1662, the Irish Act of Settlement set up a Court of Claims to examine all these issues. It was overwhelmed by the volume of work and lack of land to square the circle. It left almost everyone dissatisfied except those with family connection or clout with the Irish administration to get their claims to the head of the queue. The 80 per cent of the population who were Catholic were left with 20 per cent of the land. It left England with a permanent problem of garrisoning Ireland and facing a low-level insurgency of ‘Tories’ and ‘Rapparees’ (brigands). It ensured that the Revolution of 1688 in Ireland was not in the least Glorious. It was another bloodbath.

The year 1662 was a time of deceptive calm. Everywhere there is evidence that in the face of a grieving Puritan minority, the peoples of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland set out to enjoy the pleasures forbidden them for twenty years, and engaged in febrile efforts to silence or intimidate those who might try to start the conflict all over again. Charles II talked of religious liberty but ordered the assassination of his most implacable opponents as they plotted against him in exile. The Puritan minister Adam Martindale gave up his pulpit in Rostherne, Cheshire, and invited his parishioners round on Sunday evenings to criticize the sermons given earlier in the day by his successor. He was one of many. What was not restored at the Restoration was peace of mind.

1653
Cromwell as lord protector
. Cromwell – wearied by the failure of the Rump Parliament to come up with a new constitution, a new religious framework and more social justice – used his troops to disband it (20 April) and established a Nominated Assembly of godly men with a mandate (4 July) to find long-term solutions. It failed completely and in December Cromwell reluctantly agreed to become lord protector under a constitution drawn up by General John Lambert.

1657
Cromwell refuses the crown
. Cromwell was put under great parliamentary pressure to become king. Since the protectorate was not ‘known to the laws’, he had more discretionary power than many MPs thought wise; and they thought King Oliver would broaden his support among the many who admired monarchy but not the House of Stuart. But Cromwell’s fear that because God had ‘blasted the family and the name’ it meant He did not want any monarch, made him decline.

1660
Death of Puritanism
. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, there was political meltdown and the army too fell into factions. In February George Monck, the general in charge of Scotland, marched south and ordered free elections. Parliament recalled the king, but even before they did so, Easter was celebrated in thousands of parishes, and maypoles sprang up on village greens; both were symbols that the Puritan experiment had failed.

1672
Test Acts
. Charles went to war with the Dutch in alliance with the French but chickened out of a deal with Louis XIV to declare himself a Catholic. He did, however, attempt, by prerogative action, to give full rights of religious assembly to both Protestant and Catholic Dissenters. This backfired, however, and Parliament used the power of the purse to force Charles to accept new restrictions on practising Catholics (the Test Acts).

1679
Failure of the Exclusion Bill
. Charles II had no legitimate children, and, as he aged, many Protestants feared both his authoritarianism (bribing of MPs, excessive use of discretionary power, closeness to Catholic France) and the prospect that he would be succeeded by his Catholic brother, James. The Whigs tried (but failed in the House of Lords) to break the hold of ‘divine right theory’ by promoting an Exclusion Bill, making Parliament the arbiter of the succession.

1685
Accession of King James
. In February Charles was succeeded by James II and VII, who easily saw off rebellions in England by Charles’ bastard son, the duke of Monmouth, and in Scotland by the rabidly Presbyterian earl of Argyll. Initially James tried to coax the Tory Anglicans into working with him to give equal rights to his Catholic co-religionists. They defied him.

1688
Glorious Revolution
. By 1688, James was trying to work with Whigs and Dissenters to promote his Catholic cause. The birth of a Catholic heir and the sheer scale of his attack on Anglican privilege provoked a section of the elite to invite William of Orange to invade to protect Protestantism, the succession rights of his wife (James’ daughter Mary) and to bring English arms and cash into the international coalition against Louis XIV.

1689
William and Mary
. After James fled to France, there was vicious civil war in Ireland, political blood-letting in Scotland and a painful set of compromises in England that allowed William and Mary to rule jointly on terms that some at the time (and since) believed to have changed the nature of monarchy and which others denied. The most important change was the twenty-five years’ war with France (1688–1713) that transformed the finances and governance of Britain.

1697
Peace in Europe
. The Treaty of Ryswick brought a fragile peace to Europe, although everyone knew that a war between rival claimants to the Spanish succession was imminent. In Ireland, Parliament reneged on the promises that William’s generals had made to the Catholics and began a process of sectarian measures (the Penal Laws) that enshrined social and religious injustice. It was also the year St Paul’s Cathedral (rebuilt after the Great Fire) reopened for business.

The British Isles on the eve of this momentous struggle was apparently politically stable and in no danger of violent upheaval. But beneath the façade of union and the increasingly visible integration of the Scottish and English economies there was a deep and enduring hostility to the prevailing order. England, Scotland and Ireland had for thirty years been ruled by the Whig party (the party primarily responsible for the revolution of 1688), while their old rivals, the Tories, sourly did what they could to oppose them through conventional politics. A radical element within the Tories’ ranks (the Jacobites), however, went much further and plotted and dreamed of restoring the heirs of James II and VII, the Stuart Catholic king driven out by the revolution.

The Tory party’s first loyalty was to the Church of England, and the Jacobites among them inclined to the exiled Stuart dynasty because they feared the Hanoverian dynasty’s apparent religious indifference was undermining the Anglican hold on society and hence the three kingdoms’ special relationship with God.

In Scotland, where the Union had as yet failed to deliver the economic uplift that had been promised in 1707, ongoing political and economic fusion with England remained a bitter source of division and resentment. So, when the Jacobites emerged as the champions of national independence, a wide swath of Scottish society was immediately drawn to them.

In Ireland the Catholic majority was systematically discriminated against economically, socially and legally by the Whig regime, and for two generations thousands of young Irish Catholic men had been slipping away to the Continent to serve in the armies of France and Spain. There they openly maintained their allegiance to the Stuarts and did what they could to further the Jacobite cause, while those in Ireland secretly yearned for news of the Stuart ‘attempt’ they hoped would liberate them from Whig oppression.

The Jacobite uprising that began in July 1745 came, too, in the midst of Britain’s first major conflict in nearly twenty years. The War of Austrian Succession began in 1740 when Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Silesia, and Britain threw in its lot with the beleaguered Empress Maria-Theresa against Frederick’s principal ally: France. And though Britain had done tolerably well in the opening stages of the conflict, by 1745 things had taken a turn for the worse. Maria-Theresa’s armies were hard-pressed by Prussian, French and Spanish attacks, and Britain’s ally, the Netherlands, was flagging and war-weary. Worse still, Britain’s main army, led by George II’s youngest son, William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, was defeated at the battle of Fontenoy in modern Belgium on 11 May 1745. This, in many respects, acted as the trigger for the Jacobite rebellion.