2. James II and the Glorious Revolution
James II and the Glorious Revolution 1. A new Catholic king When James II (born 1633; reigned 1685–88) succeeded to the throne in February 1685, all seemed fair. The Whigs who had tried to exclude him from the monarchy had been smashed by Charles II; meanwhile James' allies, the Tories, had made "passive obedience" a first article in their creed
—it was never right to resist a lawfully crowned king. The only possible problem was that Tories were ardently Anglican, whereas James was
Roman Catholic. Thus far, however, he had played his cards well, never criticizing the Church of England, but praising it for its loyalty to him. He was crowned according to a traditional Anglican ceremony, and he publicly promised to respect and maintain the Anglican Church, disavowing any intent to re-Catholicize England. If that relationship between monarch and Church ever broke down, James would be in trouble. Within three years, it was irreparably broken, and Tories joined with Whigs in ejecting James from the throne.
2. The Monmouth Rebellion and its aftermath James reassured the country that he was no tyrant by holding a general election. The resulting parliament, which met in May 1685, was Torydominated, owing to the way Charles II had stripped towns and cities of their right to elect anyone as MP without royal consent. The Tory MPs were as loyal as James could have wished. They voted him for life the total income Charles had enjoyed.
But there was always going to be some opposition to James; the more fiercely Protestant sections of the population did not believe his moderate pose, and would be only too glad to see James fall. Only a month after parliament met, a violent popular rebellion broke out in the south-western counties (Devon, Dorset, Somerset). It was led by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85), an illegitimate son of Charles II. Monmouth, a Protestant, had been the Whigs' favoured candidate for the throne in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, and had then been implicated in the extreme
Whigs' Rye House Plot in 1683. He was now living in exile in the Dutch Republic.
Monmouth gambled that the strongly Protestant, indeed Nonconformist, people of the south-western counties would back his claim to the throne, and rise up against James, if he (Monmouth) only showed his face and waved the flag of Protestant revolt against a popish king. Many lower class
Nonconformists did indeed rally to Monmouth when he landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset on June 11th, but none of the Protestant gentry or nobility would support his hare-brained scheme. Monmouth's ragtag army was butchered by James' professional forces at Sedgemoor in Somerset, on July
6th. Monmouth himself fled but was captured and executed only a week later.
The aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion was harrowing for Nonconformists. James put judge George Jeffreys (1654–89) in charge of the trials of those taken prisoner during and after the uprising. Jeffreys' conduct was fierce in the extreme; some 320 people were executed by hanging, and a further 800 or 900 shipped out as slave labour to the Caribbean plantations. The bodies of the executed were put on display at various spots as a gruesome object lesson in the fate of rebels. Two trials in particular achieved infamy. An elderly lady, Alice Lyle, a member of the royalist gentry, was tried for simply giving compassionate shelter to a
Nonconformist minister and his companion who had fled from Sedgemoor; she was sentenced to death by burning, although in the event James mercifully allowed her to be beheaded. Another lady, the devout Baptist
Elizabeth Gaunt, was tried for attempting to help another refugee flee the country; she was not fortunate enough to belong to the gentry, and was actually burnt alive—the last woman to be punished by this method in England. Although most people did not support the Monmouth Rebellion, they were shocked and horrified by the government's brutality in its aftermath. The trials became known as the "Bloody Assizes",23 and Jeffreys acquired the nickname "the Hanging Judge".
If James' response to the Monmouth Rebellion was not a public relations success, even worse came in October. That month, Louis XIV, Catholic king of France, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which for 100 years had guaranteed the religious liberty of his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots.
Huguenot refugees began flooding into England, telling spine-chilling stories of Catholic intolerance in France. James could not prevent his people giving a generous welcome to the Huguenot refugees, but it damaged him badly. The Protestant English began fearing that Catholic
James would sooner or later treat them as Louis XIV had treated French Protestants.24
When parliament reassembled in November, James unnerved the MPs by demanding huge sums to increase the size of the royal army (he had become paranoid about further rebellions). He also informed them that the Catholic military officers he had appointed, contrary to the Test Act of 1673, would stay in command, because he could not trust any others to be faithful to him. Pro-James though the Tory MPs were, they were alarmed. Was this
James creating a Catholic army to impose his religion on England? They would not vote him the large sum he required. So he suspended parliament.
In reality he had dissolved it, for this particular parliament would never assemble again.
3. Re-Catholicizing the nation In 1686, James began taking measures to promote Catholicism. He did this by using the monarch's alleged "dispensing power" to exempt individuals from the discriminatory religious laws against them. James now employed this power to exempt Catholics from the Test Act, and put them in top positions in the army, the universities, and the royal government. James deliberately arranged for an important legal case to come to trial that year. It involved a Catholic army officer, Edward Hales, who argued that the king's dispensing power gave Hales the right to his military commission without taking the anti-Catholic oaths required by the Test Act. Prior to the trial,
James had dismissed from office almost all the judges who, on being asked, said they did not believe in the legality of the dispensing power. As a result, the verdict given on June 21st was a great victory for James: 11 of the 12 judges declared in favour of Hales, accepting the validity of his argument about the dispensing power of the monarch.
England's judiciary had checkmated England's parliament, and given James the green light to pursue his policy of staffing the nation's leading institutions with Catholics. 13 Catholics were sworn in as members of the king's Privy Council; Anglican Tories who objected were dismissed. In fact,
James now seemed to go out of his way to flaunt his Catholicism in the face of his people. He built royal Catholic chapels at Whitehall and Windsor; he set up a new Catholic printing press in Oxford; the royal printers in London and York became Catholics, and began printing Catholic books; Catholics were put in charge of the armed forces and the civil service; Anglican clergy were forbidden to preach against Catholicism. James also tightened the screws on the universities. He appointed a Catholic as head of University
College, Cambridge, with a Jesuit chaplain who celebrated the mass in public. Another Catholic was made head of the Oxford cathedral college of Christ Church. In February 1687, James ordered the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University to confer a degree on a Benedictine monk, Alban
Francis. However, Francis declined to take the customary academic oaths (they were Protestant in language). James insisted that Francis must receive the degree without the oaths; the university vice-chancellor, John Peachell
(1630–90), refused. Peachell was sacked, after being bullied in public hearings by the infamous Judge Jeffreys.
The public outcry against James' actions was great. Anti-Catholic pamphlets and treatises gushed from Protestant printing presses. So James tried to divide the Protestant opposition by cloaking his pro-Catholic policy in a general good-will to all non-Anglicans; in April 1687, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending all discriminatory laws against Protestant Nonconformists as well as Roman Catholics. Perhaps the Nonconformists could be won over, and a Catholic-Nonconformist alliance against Anglican intolerance might shore up James' throne? Although
Nonconformists took advantage of the Indulgence to worship freely, most of them remained deeply suspicious of James' motives. Two of the foremost
Presbyterians, Richard Baxter and John Howe, went so far as to denounce the Indulgence as unconstitutional.
James pressed ahead. One of the most controversial of his acts, following hot on the heels of the Indulgence, was to dismiss from Magdalen College,
Oxford, its entire governing body (the "fellows", of whom there were 25) for refusing to have a royally chosen Catholic as head of College. (They had already elected an Anglican.) James forcibly replaced all the fellows with Catholics. A venerable college of Oxford University, the home of Anglican learning and nursery of Anglican piety, had been transformed into a virtual seminary for training Catholic priests. Anglicans were transfixed with horror.
James also outraged the Tory landowners. They no longer trusted him; so he could no longer rely on Tory magistrates to do his bidding. The king therefore carried out a purge, replacing the magistrates drawn from traditional Tory families with compliant non-entities of his own choosing, some of whom were Catholic or Nonconformist. The purge sent howls of anguish through the entire Tory establishment. It led to absurd scenes, for example in Newcastle, where James appointed a Catholic mayor and a Nonconformist council: the council loathed the papist mayor, and kept voting against his every attempt to present an official declaration of loyalty to James.
The alliance between James and Tory Anglicanism was clearly at an end.
Since the Whigs were still implacably opposed to him, it left the king with almost no friends in the entire English political class. In August, the leading
Tory-Anglican politician, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (1633–95), wrote a best-selling response to the royal Indulgence of February. This was
Halifax's Letter to a Dissenter, in which he famously told Nonconformists
concerning James' advances to them, "You are therefore to be hugged now, only that you may the better be squeezed at another time." 20,000 copies of Halifax's letter were printed, and there were no fewer than six editions. It has been called the most successful leaflet (it was only six pages) of the 17th century. Most Nonconformists found Halifax's argument all too plausible, and refused any alliance with James.
James' position was further undermined by another best-selling pamphlet, published in November by Gaspar Fagel (1634–88), the "grand pensionary" (chief magistrate) of Holland, most powerful of the Dutch
Republic's provinces. Fagel was acting on behalf of William of Orange (1650–1702), the Calvinist Republic's "stadtholder" or highest federal official. William's stake in the English scene was his marriage to James'
Protestant daughter Mary (1662–94), which meant that if James died without a son, Mary would inherit the English throne. In the November letter, Fagel publicized the fact that William and Mary both disapproved of James' proposed abolition of the 1673 Test Act which prevented Catholics from holding office. It was hinted that they also disapproved of his
Declaration of Indulgence. The pamphlet's message spread like wildfire; by 1688, some 55,000 copies had been sold. English Protestants began looking overseas to William of Orange as their great hope of deliverance.
4. The fall of the house of James In April 1688, James reissued his Declaration of Indulgence. This time he ordered the clergy of the established Church to read it out from their pulpits.
Here was a crisis of conscience: ever since the Restoration, Anglican clergy had extolled the virtue of passive obedience to the reigning monarch. Yet now their monarch was commanding them to act as his agents in promulgating a decree they believed to be aimed at the destruction of their
Church. They had little doubt that it was a mere cover for the further promotion of Roman Catholicism. Many of them also doubted its legality: could the king ride roughshod over parliament in this manner, by suspending its laws? Was parliament not part of the constitution, as well as the monarchy? Had it not been the Cavalier Parliament that had restored the Anglican Church in 1662? James was sure the spineless clergy would obey and read out the Indulgence. He had a rude awakening.
Seven of the bishops—Archbishop William Sancroft (1617–93) of Canterbury, John Lake (1624–89) of Chichester, William Lloyd (1627–
1717) of Norwich, Thomas White (1628–98) of Peterborough, Francis Turner (1637–1700) of Ely, Thomas Ken (1637–1711) of Bath and Wells, and Jonathan Trelawney (1650–1721) of Bristol—handed in a petition to James, asking to be excused from reading the Indulgence. Several other leading Anglican clergy who did not have bishoprics also signed the petition. Henry Compton (1632–1713), the militantly Protestant bishop of London, would have signed, but James had already suspended Compton from his Episcopal functions for his outspoken opposition to royal
Romanizing (Compton had refused to discipline one of his clergy in 1686 for an anti-Catholic sermon). Enraged, James had the seven bishops arrested and tried for seditious libel. Meanwhile, those Anglican clergy who did read the Indulgence from the pulpit found that their congregations walked out in protest.
Although the Indulgence gave freedom to Protestant Nonconformists as well as Catholics, even the great majority of Nonconformists opposed the king's declaration: they believed it was unconstitutional, and that its real aim was the re-establishment of Catholicism. The Calvinistic Baptist leader
William Kiffin (1616–1701) advised churches that shared his faith to make a pragmatic use of their new-found liberty, but to offer no thanks to James, since his motives were bad and the Indulgence was unlawful. Presbyterian
leader Richard Baxter employed the freedom the king had given him by preaching a sermon praising the seven imprisoned bishops for their heroic
Christian defiance of a papist tyrant! (Perhaps for the first and last time in English history, Anglican bishops were popular heroes.) The Indulgence therefore brought no great rallying of Nonconformity to James.
Paradoxically it had the opposite effect: most Nonconformists rallied to the Anglicans who were suffering for their rejection of the Indulgence.
Anglicans responded, and spoke of toleration for Nonconformists being lawfully enacted by a free Protestant parliament. It seemed that the differences between Anglican and Nonconformist had melted away in united Protestant opposition to a greater enemy—Rome, personified in James.
The trial of the seven bishops was held on June 29th. On June 30th, the jury returned a verdict of "Not Guilty". England went wild with celebration.
James was stunned and deeply mortified. On the night of the verdict, seven leaders of the opposition to James (including Bishop Compton of London) signed a letter addressed to William of Orange, pleading with him to land in England with his Dutch army and save the liberties of an endangered
Protestant people. The letter had even more urgency than it would otherwise have had, owing to the birth of a son to James on June 10th. This meant that James now had his own male heir to the throne. (He already had a grown-up daughter, of course—Mary, wife of William of Orange—but a daughter hardly counted in those days.) The horrifying prospect of a Catholic dynasty drove almost every English Protestant into a state of dread that was prepared to act in a revolutionary manner to preserve a Protestant England.
If it took a Dutch Calvinist army to deliver the land, so be it.
William of Orange's motive had in reality nothing to do with English liberty, or not specifically. He had only one objective in life: to destroy the ambitions of Louis XIV to control Europe in the interests of Catholic
France. William feared an alliance between Louis and James. James had thus far held back, anxious that such an alliance would alienate his people.
But William was taking no chances. He managed to secure the support of the Dutch ruling classes, and of his German allies, especially Prince
Frederick III of Brandenburg-Prussia. They could have opposed any expedition of the Dutch army to England on the grounds that it left them defenceless against France, but William convinced them that their longterm safety required a Protestant England. He may even have secured the
blessing, or the acquiescence, of Pope Innocent XI. Innocent was as opposed to Louis XIV as William was, because of the French king's assumption of power over the Catholic Church in France in the drawn-out
Gallican crisis (see Chapter 7, section 1); indeed the pope had only just excommunicated Louis.25 Then William waited for a favourable wind.
When it finally came on November 1st, William's fleet set sail for England:
600 ships carrying 15,000 troops.
Meanwhile a strong tide of anti-James feeling had been flowing in England. The rank and file of his army were turning against him; so James brought over a contingent of Irish Catholic soldiers. This merely made things worse. Anti-James riots broke out. A satirical anti-James, antiCatholic ballad, Lillibullero, penned by the leading Whig politician Thomas
Wharton (1648–1715), caught on with astonishing speed; Wharton boasted later that the ballad "had sung James out of three kingdoms" (England,
Scotland, and Ireland). William's troops landed at Torbay in Devon on November 5th. There they waited. There was no general uprising; the people of the south-western counties had been too traumatized by their experience during Monmouth's rebellion to take any further insurrectionary action. But William did not need to do anything. He published a manifesto, disclaiming any intention of conquest, assuring everyone that he had come purely at the invitation of England's civil and spiritual leaders, denouncing
James' unconstitutional acts, and calling for a free parliament to resolve the nation's grievances.
James ordered his unreliable army to Salisbury. But already some of the foremost English nobles had declared for William. The top Tory statesman,
Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby (1632–12), one of the seven who had signed the letter of invitation to William, had mobilized the northern counties against James, and captured York; the top Whig statesman,
William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire (1640–1707), who had also signed the invitation, had mobilized the midlands. On November 24th,
James' most loyal servant and most capable general, the Tory Lord John Churchill (1650–1722), defected from the Salisbury army to William, together with 400 officers and men. James lost his nerve and resolved on flight. He was consumed with fear that he might meet the same fate as his father, Charles I—executed by his own people. The fugitive king was captured by a Protestant mob at Faversham and carried back a prisoner to Whitehall; but William's Dutch troops liberated the fallen monarch, and
allowed him to escape to France. William judged it best to have James out of the way.
5. The 1689 Revolution settlement Once James had left England, the members of the House of Lords, together with those who had been elected MPs in the House of Commons under Charles II, acting as the representatives of the country, entrusted William with its administration. He arranged for a general election to send delegates to a "convention"—a special parliament to settle England's political and religious affairs. The Convention Parliament met on January 22nd 1689.
After intense debate, parliament finally declared that since James had abandoned his country, the English throne was now vacant. On this, Whigs and Tories were agreed, after much boggling by the Tories. They were not agreed on a solution to the vacancy. Whigs wanted to give William the crown; Tories preferred to make him a "regent" ruling theoretically in the name of James II's newborn son, so that the strictest principle of hereditary monarchy from father to son would be preserved. The problem with the Tory solution was that William would not accept it. If he was to govern
England, he wanted a free hand; he must be king.
The Tories caved in. On 11th April, Bishop Compton of London crowned William and Mary as joint monarchs of England (William's claim to the throne was through Mary, as daughter of James II—not quite as good as a son, but sufficient). They were crowned on condition that they accepted a Bill of Rights; among other things, the Bill prohibited Roman Catholics from occupying the throne, declared illegal the monarch's power to suspend the operation of laws passed by parliament, and made parliamentary freedom of speech absolute—no MP could be prosecuted for anything said in parliament. William and Mary's acceptance of the Bill of Rights extinguished any idea of absolute monarchical authority in England. They ruled under a constitution.
These events collectively are known in English history as the Glorious Revolution—glorious because bloodless.
The religious settlement of 1689 brought an end at last to the persecution of Nonconformists. As a "reward" for their refusal to ally themselves with James, they were now given legal freedom to worship in the Toleration Act of May 1689. (The Conventicle Act of 1664 and the Five Mile Act of 1665 were both repealed.) There were conditions. The Act did not apply to antiTrinitarians, only to Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers
(who all confessed the Trinity). Unitarians would have to wait until 1813 before parliament granted them legal toleration.
To obtain the benefits of the Act, those of Presbyterian, Independent, and Baptist persuasion had to subscribe to the 39 Articles of the Anglican
Church, except the parts dealing with church government and (for Baptists) the article on baptism. Richard Baxter published a treatise, Mr Baxter's
Sense of the Articles, to enable Nonconformists who still had scruples about some of the 39 Articles to sign them with a good conscience. Quakers were exempt from any allegiance to the 39 Articles; they merely had to declare their faith in the Trinity and the inspiration of the Bible. Nonconformists also had to swear allegiance to the reigning monarch, and subscribe to a statement rejecting transubstantiation. On complying with these terms,
Nonconformists became as fully legally protected as Anglicans in their worship. The new freedom was immediately exploited by Nonconformists, and hundreds of new chapels were built and new congregations founded.
Nonconformists were required to register their places of worship with the civil authorities, and were not allowed to bar anyone from their meetings, but disturbing Nonconformist worship was now a criminal offence.
However, there was no lifting of the civil restrictions on Nonconformists.
They could still not hold public office (therefore not sit as MPs),26 nor send their sons to Oxford or Cambridge. This exclusion from the political and educational life of the national establishment, however, was not quite as galling as it may sound. Some Nonconformists could and did sit as MPs by "occasionally" taking holy communion in the Anglican Church, thus getting around the Corporation Act of 1662 and the Test Act of 1673. Even where they did not have a Nonconformist MP, Nonconformists could rely implicitly on the Whigs to safeguard their interests in parliament—the Whigs became the political voice of Nonconformity, while the Tories were the political voice of Anglicanism. As for Oxford and Cambridge,
Nonconformists could get an equal or superior education at a good Dissenting academy (see this Chapter section 1), to the vexation of envious
Anglicans.
One restriction that remained on Nonconformists that was genuinely galling: they still had a legal obligation to pay tithes to the Anglican
Church. Tithes had a long and complicated future ahead of them in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
James II made one attempt to recover his throne. Now that he was in exile in France, his alliance with Louis XIV became a reality; Louis gave him 6,000 French troops, and James landed with them in Ireland in March
1689. The Catholic Irish rallied to his support and threw off the British yoke. However, most Irish Protestants proved to be "Williamites" not "Jacobites".27 The Williamite military operations in Ireland were led for a year by the distinguished German Calvinist general, Frederick Schomberg
(c.1615–90), who had gained French citizenship and lived in France, working for Louis XIV, until Louis expelled the Huguenots in 1685.
Schomberg was now general-in-chief of William's ally, the Calvinist Prince Frederick III of Brandenburg-Prussia. Schomberg's progress in quelling the Irish Jacobites was slow, so in June 1690, William himself joined the fray, taking personal command of his forces in Ireland. When William defeated
James' army at the battle of the River Boyne in Leinster on July 1st, James' courage failed (although it was not a catastrophic defeat—and on William's side, Schomberg was killed). The ousted monarch fled back to France. His flight demoralized the Irish Jacobites badly. Within a year, Williamite forces had reconquered Ireland; British Protestant rule was once again assured, and the Catholic majority were again second-class citizens in their own land.
6. The Nonjurors One problem the Glorious Revolution unexpectedly bequeathed to the Anglican Church was a schism. The Anglican clergy had sworn an oath of allegiance to James II. Parliament now required them to swear an oath of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary. Six bishops and 400 parish ministers refused. They believed their oath to James as king was binding; indeed, they held that hereditary monarchy was a sacred institution, and that no act of parliament could exchange one king for another. James II was lawful monarch still, and after his death, his heirs would succeed to the throne. These clergy resigned from the Church of England, which had largely sworn allegiance to William and Mary, and created their own alternative Church, which they maintained was the true
Anglican Church. They are referred to as the Nonjurors, and their tradition is known as the Nonjuring movement (the word is derived from Latin: "the non-swearers", i.e., those who would not swear allegiance to William and Mary). The six Nonjuring bishops were replaced by Latitudinarians in the Anglican hierarchy, which helped cement Latitudinarian supremacy as the reigning "party" on into the 18th century.
The Nonjurors included five of the seven bishops whom James II had put on trial for refusing to read out his Declaration of Indulgence. That meant
Anglicanism lost its Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, to the Nonjurors. Sancroft set an uncompromising example to the other Nonjurors by refusing even to worship in the parish church in Suffolk where he had retired; the official Anglican Church, by abandoning James, was now little short of apostate, in Sancroft's view. He was, however, a mild and benevolent man, revered even by his enemies. Equally revered was Thomas
Ken, Nonjuring Bishop of Bath and Wells, universally famous for the poetic doxology:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
Ken's declaration in his last will and testament summed up the religious position of the Nonjurors against Anglicans, Nonconformists, and Roman
Catholics:
I die in the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Faith, professed by the whole Church before the disunion of East and West: more particularly, I die in the Communion of the Church of England, as it stands distinguished from all Papal and Puritan innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross.
By "the Church of England" here, Ken meant the Church of England as envisaged by Nonjurors, rather than the actual Church of England from which he had seceded. By "the doctrine of the Cross", he meant the High
Church Tory doctrine of passive obedience, i.e. that all rebellion against one's sovereign was always wrong.
One Nonjuring bishop, William Lloyd of Norwich, made sure the Nonjuring movement would not rapidly die out by consecrating two more bishops, an act that spawned a series of consecrations which extended the movement's life to the end of the 18th century. There were soon interesting developments within the Nonjuring tradition, notably the restoration by some Nonjurors of several ancient practices to holy communion—the mixed chalice (wine and water), the "epiclesis" prayer for the descent of the Spirit, the offering of the bread and wine to the Father as a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and prayer for the faithful departed. There were also fascinating negotiations between the Nonjurors and the Eastern Orthodox between 1716 and 1725 for some kind of union, but these came to nothing because of disagreements over a few stubborn issues like the veneration of saints and the nature of Christ's presence in the eucharist.
By the early decades of the 19th century, the Nonjuring clergy and congregations had dwindled away into extinction. Still, the fact that the movement endured for a hundred years, and boasted some of the holiest and most learned divines in England, says something for its spirit. By far the most famous Nonjuror was to be William Law (1686–1761); his Serious
Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) would impact deeply on many of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, such as George Whitefield and the Wesley brothers, and still ranks as one of the greatest spiritual classics in the English language.