A School History of England/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
THE FALL OF THE STUARTS AND THE REVOLUTION, 1660–1688
Charles II, 1660–85.The lessons of the ‘Great Rebellion’ were by no means thrown away upon Charles Il. Again a changed England.No king after 1660 ever attempted to raise a penny without consent of Parliament. Once, but only once, at the end of his reign, Charles let four years go by without calling a Parliament. Once, but only for a moment, an unlawful court of justice was created by James Il; and there were hardly any other attempts at ‘strong government’ of the Tudor type. There were plenty of quarrels to come between Kings and Parliaments, but these were nearly always about religion or foreign wars.
The Church restored.As far as possible everything was restored, in Great Britain and Ireland, as it had existed just before the Civil War. The two Houses of Parliament, with all their old power, were restored. The Church of England, with Prayer Book and bishops, was restored as in 1640. It had suffered quite as much as the Crown, or the Cavaliers who had fought for the Crown. A certain amount but by no means all of the land was restored to its rightful owners. The Dissenters.Almost all the Church livings had been given away to Presbyterians and other Dissenters. During the Rebellion a whole crop of ‘sects’had arisen, some of which, like the Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers, are still with us. In 1660 all wished for nothing better than a peaceful life, and to conduct their worship in their own way. No one could complain when the church livings were given back to the Church of England; Parliament passes laws against Dissenters, 1661–5.but it was a great mistake of Parliament and Church to prevent the Dissenters from holding their public worship as they pleased. It was a lasting misfortune for England that a series of laws was passed in the reign of Charles II to shut out both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from all offices in the State, and even from offices in town councils. Catholics were excluded from Parliament, for the Great Rebellion had left a hatred of Popery greater than that which had existed before it. These intolerant laws, though partly softened for Protestant Dissenters in 1690, and for Catholics also in the reign of George III, were not abolished till 1828 and 1829. Of course, no persons now suffered death for their religion (and it was in Charles II’s reign that Queen Mary’s laws for burning heretics were finally wiped out), but many Dissenters were imprisoned, among them John Bunyan, author of the Pilgrim’s Progress.
The Restoration in Scotland.In Scotland a similar restoration took place of the old Scottish Parliament, in which Lords and Commons had always sat in one house; of Church government by bishops; of lands which had been confiscated. The extreme Covenanters refused to recognize these changes, and before long broke out into open rebellion in the south-west. Rebellion went on smouldering a good deal until 1688; much cruelty was exercised, and much more was wrongly believed to have been exercised, in putting it down. Charles's English ministers would have liked to govern Scotland from London and to unite the two Parliaments, but the patriotic spirit of the smaller country was as yet entirely against this.
King Charles II came back to find a new kind of England, Character of Charles II.an England less high-minded, less romantic, more ‘modern’, and more commonplace than before the war. The country was again set upon peace, order and money-getting. The King set a bad example in his private life, but in his public life he was not by any means a bad king. He was very clever, and had a keen eye for the interests of trade, of the colonies and of the Navy. The Cromwellians had bequeathed to him a very fine Navy; but too often he let it rot for want of spending money on it. His sailors were badly paid and badly cared for; he let his contractors swindle him, and he was too idle to look into small but important matters himself. Also he was always shockingly in want of money to spend upon pleasure, and, if Parliament would not give him enough, he was apt to ask the King of France to pay him large sums, in return for which he would promise to do something which that king wanted—not always to the honour of England. But, when he had got the money, Charles very seldom kept his promises to King Louis.
Englishmen’s dread of France,France was now taking the place in the eyes of Englishmen which Spain had held in the period 1560–1640, the place, that is, of the national bugbear and terror, whose vast army and vast wealth were to be used to help the Pope and to spread the Catholic faith. Englishmen wanted to fight King Louis, just as they had wanted to fight King Philip in James I’s days. Charles Il, and rivalry with the Dutch.however, saw that our real rivals were the Protestant Dutch, whose merchant-ships covered all seas, whose trading stations were all over the world. And, if you are to understand this, it is time that I told you something about the growth of our own Colonial Empire.
The idea of colonies beyond the seas.The first idea of all voyages to distant countries had been to get either gold and silver, or precious goods like silk and spices, which could not be grown in Europe. Spain, Portugal, Holland and France had all been ahead of us in the race of discovery; but we were going to beat them all in the long run. Sir Walter Raleigh.It was Sir Walter Raleigh, in Elizabeth's reign, who first imagined a true ‘colony’. He did not mean, as the Spaniards meant, a sort of shop, in which Englishmen were to buy gold or silk or spices; but rather a ‘plantation’ of Englishmen in some distant land who were to buy all their goods, their iron tools, their woollen clothes, their linen and their boots from England. This would, in the first place, give an enormous lift to English manufactures, and, in the second place, would create a piece of ‘England-beyond-the-sea’, a piece, in fact, of an English Empire. Raleigh planned to plant such a colony in Virginia, on the shore of North America; it collapsed for want of funds. But the idea lived on, and in 1606 it was taken up again by a group of London merchants, who subscribed money and sent out colonists. By the year 1620, Virginia was a flourishing little state.
The Pilgrim Fathers in America, 1620.In that year some sturdy Puritans, since called the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, got leave to emigrate to North America. They objected to being compelled to use the Prayer Book service in England, and wanted to worship God in their own fashion; and they founded a little state called ‘Plymouth’ on the American coast. Other colonies, some religious, some commercial in their British origin, soon followed, and, by 1660, British America in seventeenth century.the whole eastern coast of North America was dotted with little English states; but, between Virginia and the more sternly Puritan ‘New England’, lay a little wedge, on the valley of the River Hudson, which had been settled by the Dutch. There was no gold in North America, and, except tobacco, no rich natural crop; but there was a virgin soil of great fertility, vast forests full of valuable timber, swarms of fur-bearing animals like beavers, and splendid fisheries on the coasts. So these peoples rapidly grew into rich and prosperous little states, working, in a climate not unlike that of Europe, at the same sort of work that their fathers had known across the ocean.
Temper of the Colonists.But many of the colonies were full of Puritans and Protestant Dissenters, the very men who, in King Charles I’s reign, had fought against the Crown. So there was born, in all our colonists, a spirit of resistance to government in general, and the quite foolish notion that all government is oppressive. Such a spirit might easily lead to rebellion. The colonists, however, knew well that all round them were Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Spaniards, casting greedy eyes on their riches, and that against these foes only the English fleet could protect them. So some sort of pretence of loyalty to their Mother Country was for many years almost a necessity to them. The Mother Country usually left them to themselves; it never taxed them; Government of the Colonies.it sent them Governors, who hoisted a British flag outside their houses, and ‘took the lead in Society’, but did little other governing. Each colony set up a miniature House of Commons, or something like it, of its own, and made its own laws on the English model. On one thing only England insisted, that the colonists were to buy their goods wholly from English merchants; and if they produced any goods which England wanted and could not grow herself (e.g. tobacco, rice, beaver-skins) they were to send all such goods to England.
The two Dutch Wars, 1664 and 1672.Charles Il fought two great wars with the Dutch during his reign; and great sailors came to the front, though none as great as Robert Blake, who had been Cromwell's admiral. The sailors and the Navy covered themselves with glory, but, as I said above, the management of the Service was shockingly bad, and it was no thanks to King Charles that the Dutch did not win.
The Dutch in the Medway.
Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintained so,
They’re only got by sword and shot,
And this the Dutchmen know!
You spend on your delight,
How can you then have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow—
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
No oakum can be found,
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
And this the Dutchmen know!
We scarce can get at all,
Their price was spent in merriment
And revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends—
And this the Dutchmen know!
No Court will pay our claims—
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter’s topsails,
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet—
And this the Dutchmen know!
There were some fearful drawn battles, both in the North Sea and the Channel. Once the Dutch sailed into the Thames and the Medway and burned a lot of our ships at Chatham. But the main result of these wars was that the Dutch gave up to us their colony in North America, which was henceforth to be called New York. New York.In the same reign ‘North and South Carolina’ were added to our American list of states; they lie south of Virginia, are hot and swampy, and produce mainly rice and tobacco.
Other colonies.Besides these colonies we possessed several valuable West Indian islands, notably Jamaica, which grew sugar; we had a whale-fishing and fur-trading station in Hudson Bay, northwards from the French settlements in Canada; we had several little dots of land protected by forts on the west coast of Africa, whence we exported black slaves to our own and the Spanish colonies; and, in India, we had Bombay and Madras. The ‘East India Company’ had been founded to trade with the far East (from which the Dutch had steadily driven out the first European traders, the Portuguese), as far back as the end of Elizabeth's reign. Dutch, Frenchmen and Englishmen scrambled against each other to get permission, from the ‘Great Moguls’ and other Eastern Kings with magnificent names, to sell and buy in those countries; and, on the whole, during the seventeenth century the English Company got the best of the trade with Hindostan into its hands. So you see the seeds of a great empire were already sown, and the colonial trade made English merchants both rich and very adventurous.
Parties in Parliament.I wish I could say as much good for Charles II’s reign at home as abroad, but I cannot. And this is mainly because in his reign we feel that England had ceased to be united, and seemed to have little chance of recovering its unity. The notion that ‘all Kings are trying to oppress all peoples’ seems to have grown up; it was the outcome of the Civil War. So there are now two ‘parties’ in Parliament and even in the nation. There are the party of the King and his ministers, and the party of those who are not his ministers, but would like to be. ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’.These parties were then called ‘Tories’ and ‘Whigs’; in our days they call themselves ‘Conservatives’ and ‘Liberals’ (or ‘Radicals’). Each was supposed to represent certain principles of government; the Tories were for Church and Crown and gentlemen; the Whigs for Dissenters, for trade, and for all who would bully the King.
Their pretended principles.Tories were supposed to be against all changes in laws or institutions; the Whigs were supposed to favour moderate and slow changes of law. Both professed to be utterly loyal to the Constitution, i.e. to government by King, Lords, and Commons. But neither was really true to its original principles. The Whigs originally favoured a vast empire, and the careful protection of British trade, by war if necessary, especially by war with Catholic France; whereas the Tories were all for a French alliance and despised trade and colonies. Nowadays things have reversed themselves; and it is the Conservatives (or Tories) who want to protect British trade, to keep a large army and navy always ready for war, and to win the love of our brothers in the Colonies. Each party has constantly taken a different view of what the exact needs of Britain are, and each has exaggerated its own view, out of rivalry with the other party.
Government by ‘Party’.And this has been unfortunate; for it has too often made the leaders of each party tell lies to the people of Great Britain, in order to get their friends elected to Parliament, and themselves to office as the King’s ministers. For you will see, if you reflect, that, when every law and every grant of money has to be passed by both Houses of Parliament, it would be of no use to a king to have Whig ministers if there was a Tory majority in the House of Commons; a King who wanted to govern well and without quarrels must take ministers from the party which, for the time, has the upper hand in the House of Commons. In those days the House of Commons was chosen by a very small body of electors; now it is chosen by almost all the grown-up men in Great Britain. But the principle was the same then as now; a king who, perhaps, wanted to make a ‘Whig’ war or carry a ‘Whig’ law might suddenly find himself, after the election of a new Parliament, face to face with a ‘Tory’ House of Commons, and so he would have to dismiss his Whig ministers, take Tory ministers, and drop his ‘Whig’ war or his ‘Whig’ law. No doubt it has made Kings govern according to what was supposed to be the wish of their people for the time being; but, in the first place, a people as a whole seldom wishes the same thing for many years on end, and does not by any means always wish what is best for the country; in the second place, the system leads to friction and quarrel between parties, and so to waste of power and lack of union in the nation.
Question of the succession.All this was only beginning in Charles II’s reign, but it was beginning, and it was going to go on and get worse. It has gone on and got worse every day until now. In Charles II's time Parliament was constantly the scene of fierce party disputes, mainly upon religion. Charles had no lawful sons, and his heir was his brother James, who after the death of his first wife had become a Catholic and married an Italian Catholic lady; Charles himself was accused of favouring Catholics, even of being secretly a Catholic. The ‘Popish Plot’, 1678.Wild stories were started and believed of ‘Popish plots’ to kill Charles and set up James. (Charles, who was perhaps the most genuinely humorous of all our Kings, said to his brother, ‘Dear James, no one would be such a fool as to kill me in order to make you king’.) The Whigs got up a plan to shut out James from the succession and to set up a bastard son of Charles in his place; in 1680, 1681, it looked almost like a civil war between Tories and Whigs. Death of Charles II, 1685.But all moderate men dreaded this, and the King played his game so cleverly that, when he died in 1685, his brother James succeeded him without trouble. Charles had taken sharp vengeance on some of the Whig plotters, and their families did not forget the fact.
James II, 1685–8; his character.James II, however, was not merely the Catholic King of a strongly Protestant people; he was also the most obstinate man in England. If not, like Edward II, a crowned ass, he was at least a crowned mule. In three years he had wrecked his own throne, and very nearly pulled down the ancient monarchy of England on the top of himself. His Catholic faith.His Parliament was quite loyal and quite prepared to shut its eyes to his Catholic faith, if he would not flaunt it in every one’s face. But, from the very first, he set himself not only to do this, but to make the Catholics supreme in the State. He wished to give them all posts in Army, Navy and Civil Service, and even in the Church of England. He tries to beguile the Dissenters, 1687.He thought that by promising to abolish all laws against the Protestant Dissenters he might get them to help him to abolish the laws against the Catholics also. But the Dissenters, who certainly had never loved the Church of England, feared a Catholic King much more, and altogether refused to listen to James; they threw in their lot with those very churchmen and bishops who had bullied them. In Ireland, James appealed to the wildest passions of the Irish against the Protestant colonies of Englishmen which had been planted there by Elizabeth, by James I and by Cromwell, and confirmed in their lands by Charles Il. To the one person who could perhaps have helped him to put down England by the sword, namely King Louis of France, this crowned mule turned a deaf ear, and professed that he wanted no such help. In short he listened to nobody but a few Catholic priests in his own household.
Question of the succession.Until 1688 his heir had been his eldest daughter, the good and beloved Princess Mary, who had been married in 1677 to her Dutch cousin, Prince William of Orange, who was now the leader of Protestant (and much of Catholic) Europe against the King of France. Most Englishmen were content to wait till James should die; then this darling Protestant girl would be their queen. Birth of Prince James Edward, 1688.But in June, 1688, James had a son born to him, who would, of course, be brought up as a Papist. The whole nation shivered at the prospect; its leaders, Whig and moderate Tory alike, would wait no longer, The invitation to the Dutch Prince of Orange, 1688.and a secret message was at once dispatched to Prince William, begging him to come over to England, either to turn out King James or to teach him by force (for nothing but force would ever convince such a character) to govern better.
Character of William of Orange.Prince William of Orange was the son of Charles I’s daughter Mary. He was a frail little creature, nearly always ill, with an enormous hook-nose and cold grey eyes, which only lighted up in battle. His manners were also cold and unkind; but underneath all he had a soul of fire. He cared for but one thing on earth, to smash King Louis of France. He saw that rich England had been, since Cromwell's time, too much the ally of France, too much the enemy of Holland. He thought she had played false to Protestantism. If he came to England to deliver it from King James, he meant afterwards to throw the whole weight and wealth of England into the alliances which he was for ever knitting together against his hated enemy, France. For English ‘politics’ and the English Constitution, for the squabble of Whigs and Tories in the English Parliament, he cared nothing at all. But he was the husband of the heiress of England, and here was his chance of power.
Landing of William, 1688.Men went about saying that the child just born to King James was not his son at all, was no true Prince of Wales, ‘he had been smuggled into the Palace in a warming-pan’—and much other nonsense of that sort.
It suited William to believe this, or to pretend to believe it. James was well warned of what was coming, but he shut his ears, and so was quite unready to meet William and his Dutch fleet, which had a lot of English and Scottish soldiers and exiles on board it. William landed in Devonshire and moved slowly towards London. James had an army, many of whose regiments would have fought faithfully for him, if he would only have led them; Flight of James, 1688.but he turned tail and fled to France; and just before Christmas, 1688, William entered London.
Who is to be king?What was to be done? Was James still king? Had Mary become queen? Who was to call a Parliament? (only a king can do this, and it seemed as if there was no King). William, however, called a ‘Convention’ (which was a Parliament in all but name), and, after some debate, this body decided that James was no longer King, William III and Mary Il, 1689.but that William and Mary were joint King and Queen of England and Ireland. A Scottish Convention declared the same thing for Scotland. The Bill of Rights, 1689.A document was drawn up called the ‘Bill of Rights’ which is a sort of second edition of Magna Charta. It fully expresses the idea that the Sovereign of England is a ‘limited monarch’ and that there are a great many things he may not do.
The Revolution of 1688–9.This ‘Revolution of 1688’ was mainly the work of the Whigs, and William has often been called the ‘Whig Deliverer’. Revolutions are bad things, but it is difficult to see how this one could have been avoided. James was a real tyrant, almost as impossible a ruler for Englishmen as John or ‘Bloody’ Mary I had been; and, since Mary II refused to reign without her husband, and the baby Prince of Wales had fled with his father, the question was perhaps settled in the only satisfactory manner. But England was by no means united by the settlement; William was a foreigner and a foreigner he remained till his death.