The central act of King Charles III’s coronation on 6 May will be his crowning with the St Edward’s Crown. He will be only the seventh monarch to wear it. That is because the current crown was made for Charles II at the Restoration and was not used during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Its name however recalls a much older crown. As early as the twelfth century the monks of Westminster Abbey possessed what they claimed was the crown of St Edward the Confessor. In time some even said that it had belonged to Alfred the Great. This was the crown with which English monarchs were crowned. It however had been broken up and melted down in 1649 when the Rump Parliament ordered the destruction of the old coronation regalia. New regalia therefore had to be created for Charles II on his return from exile in 1660.

The circumstances surrounding the creation of that new crown were less than straightforward. They were further confused during the twentieth century by speculation that it was made using gold from the old crown. Every aspect of that theory has been refuted. What had confused scholars was that the new crown was probably produced in two stages. In both, the 1660 Parliament took the lead.

A new Parliament assembled at Westminster on 25 April 1660. Its Members had been elected in elections authorised by the Long Parliament before it had dissolved itself the previous month. The big questions confronting it were whether they would recognise Charles II, then in exile in the Dutch Republic, as king and, if so, on what terms. The big breakthrough came on 1 May, when Parliament received a message from Charles setting out a series of promises which MPs were then able to accept. On that basis, the Commons and the Lords agreed that he should be invited back.

Both Houses moved quickly to prepare for the king’s arrival. The palaces needed to be made ready and the complicated process of recovering Charles I’s possessions, many of which had been sold off a decade earlier, was begun. MPs were also mindful that the new king would need new regalia. On 15 May, they therefore ordered a crown, a sceptre and ermine robes for the king. The crown and the sceptre were to be supplied by Sir Thomas Vyner, the pre-eminent London goldsmith. The cost was set at £900. These gifts were clearly intended by MPs as symbols of their eagerness to welcome their new sovereign.

This crown was certainly made. Vyner mentioned it in a petition he submitted to the king only a few months later. It was also mentioned by Garter king of arms in a memo written later that year. But there is no evidence that Charles had yet worn it. The usual practice in England was that monarchs did not wear crowns prior to their coronation and Charles seems to have followed this tradition. This new crown would therefore not be needed until the coronation, which did not take place until 23 April 1661.

There was one important development in the meantime. By December 1660 it was clear that the king planned to dissolve this Parliament in order that new parliamentary elections could be held. A new Parliament elected on the basis of royal writs would, in royalist eyes, be legitimate in a way the existing Parliament arguably was not. But some MPs in the departing Parliament were determined to make one final statement of their loyalty. In a debate on 17 December a backbencher, Sir John Northcote, proposed that they grant up to £6,000 to buy jewels for the new coronation regalia. Other MPs were enthusiastic. Another backbencher, Sir William Lewis, then proposed a far more generous gift of an assessment tax for one month for the same purpose. That was worth roughly twice what would end up being the total bill for the entire 1661 coronation. This was accepted by the Commons, possibly without demur.

Royal officials had already decided that the coronation would take its traditional form. Other new items of regalia would therefore be needed. Those included an almost identical second crown, which would be used as the ‘state crown’, worn by the king when addressing Parliament. Orders for those pieces had probably already been placed with the new royal goldsmith, Robert Vyner, Thomas’s nephew. The Commons’ generosity ensured that the new regalia could be as impressive as possible. It probably also enabled the crown recently supplied by Sir Thomas Vyner to be further embellished. This was why a later document would speak only of alterations to the St Edward’s Crown, which is what so confused those historians who wanted to believe that the old St Edward’s Crown had somehow survived. The real story was that the 1660 Parliament wanted to augment and enhance the crown they had commissioned and presented to the new king earlier that same year.

One other modern myth, which dates back only to the 1990s, must also be rejected. It has sometimes been claimed that Charles II never paid Robert Vyner the full amount due to him for the new crown jewels. Historians suggesting this made the mistake of relying only on printed sources. The unpublished official documents record all the payments in full and reveal that, if anything, Charles was uncharacteristically prompt in settling this bill. He could make those payments because Parliament had been so munificent. Most of the regalia commissioned in 1660 and 1661 will be used again this May in exactly the way that the 1660 Parliament intended.

AB

Further reading:

A. Barclay, ‘The 1661 St Edward’s Crown – refurbished, recycled or replaced?’, The Court Historian, 13, pp. 149-70

A. Keay, The Crown Jewels (2011)

R. Strong, Coronation (2005, reissued 2022)

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

On 15 March 1672, 350 years ago, the English government issued a document headed His Majesty’s Declaration to all his loving subjects, but which has become known as the Declaration of Indulgence. It was an astonishing statement, reversing the position of English monarchical governments since Elizabeth I towards Protestant religious dissent or nonconformity. Not only that, but in explicitly suspending a large body of parliamentary legislation which required church attendance and forbade the holding of alternative religious meetings (‘conventicles’) outside the framework of the Church of England it overrode the authority of parliament itself.

Astonishing, but not entirely unpredictable. During the Civil War, in the 1640s, the so-called ‘penal laws’ against protestants who failed to conform to the established rites and ceremonies had been unenforceable. Neither the Republic nor the Protectorate in the late 1640s and 1650s had been able or willing to recreate a national Church. At the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the future of the Church was one of the most pressing issues for the new government of Charles II. The preferences of the king and his leading ministers, as well as their anxieties about the subversive potential of religious diversity, led them to resurrect the established Church in (almost) its full glory. A new parliament (the ‘Cavalier Parliament’) elected in 1661 in the first flush of enthusiasm for the return to pre-Civil War stability not only enthusiastically supported its reinstatement, but went about bolstering it with new measures that would draw the boundaries more sharply between those who conformed to all of its doctrine and litury, and those who didn’t. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 squeezed out of the Church many ministers who had hoped that the edges of conformity would remain fuzzy enough; the Conventicle Act of 1664 introduced additional penalties for those trying to build their own communities of worship.

There were two problems, though, with these efforts to stamp out protestant nonconformity and force everyone back into Church. The first was that it was never very easy to enforce: nonconformity had in the 1650s put down some quite firm roots, and many local communities were not particularly active in suppressing it. The other was that the king himself, and some of his chief ministers, became less keen on it – not because they were necessarily in favour of protestant nonconformists (whom many continued to regard with suspicion as potential subversives), but because they had other fish to fry. At least one of them, Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, was hostile to the power of the Church itself. Others, including the king himself, were more interested in the removal of the restrictions on Catholics, rather than Protestants. In this, the king reflected the interests of his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, and his formative years in the cosmopolitan courts of Europe. But he was firmly at odds with his Protestant subjects, who regarded Catholics, in theory at least, as a subversive fifth column who would, if given half a chance, take over the government, invite in the armies of the Catholic powers and the Roman inquisition to forcibly convert Protestants, or, failing that, burn them.

Charles II had already made one attempt to lift the restrictions on his Catholic subjects, announcing in the Declaration of Indulgence of 1662 an intention to introduce legislation to ‘exercise with a more universal satisfaction that power of dispensing which we conceive to be inherent in us’ – in other words to allow the king to issue some sort of licence that would enable people to escape the penalties prescribed in the penal laws against both Protestants and Catholics. But some royal ministers, particularly the Earl of Clarendon, the lord chancellor, as well as the House of Commons, were horrified when plans were unveiled that would effectively give full personal authority to the king – rather than parliamentary statute – to determine the religious regime of the country. The Commons protested and the idea was unceremoniously dropped. After Clarendon’s dismissal and exile in 1667, further attempts were made to get parliament to legislate on the subject, but they got nowhere.

The 1672 Declaration constituted a radical rethink of the whole scheme. It has long been associated with the king’s shady alliance with France in 1670, whose publicly unstated purpose was to initiate an invasion of the Dutch republic, and with the even more shady intrigue of the conversion to Catholicism not only of the king’s brother, James, Duke of York, but of the King himself. A huge amount of uncertainty surrounds these events and exactly how Charles believed they would all play out: his on-off negotiations with France in the course of 1670 and 1671 suggest rapid cold feet about the whole business. But the Declaration was clearly part of the plan. Part of its motivation seems to have been to keep Protestant nonconformists quiet since they might be expected to be loudest in their denunciation of a Catholic-led attack on the Protestant Netherlands. But it was also designed to bring about the toleration of Catholics which the king had long promised to his international Catholic allies, and to firmly establish the king’s personal authority over the Church and religious law. It was predicated on the assumption that the king could avoid having to meet a parliament – which would surely demand the declaration’s abrogation – for the moment, at least.

The Declaration was issued a few weeks before the attack on the Dutch republic. It announced that the religious penal laws were suspended forthwith, and that those Protestant ministers that wanted to establish their own congregations, outside the Church, could do so if they applied for licences. It placed dissenting ministers and their communities in an acute dilemma: if they applied for a licence to set up a dissenting conventicle, they would be implicitly acknowledging a royal authority that many regarded as illegal, as well as associating themselves with Catholic liberty and the attack on one of Europe’s foremost Protestant powers. Nevertheless, thousands did and enjoyed for a brief time a flourishing culture of free nonconformist worship.

It didn’t last. The war with the Dutch went badly, and in less than a year the king was forced to return to parliament after all to request new taxation in order to keep fighting. Inevitably, the price was the cancellation of the Indulgence, which was done just short of a year after it had been published. It had, though, given an impetus to the development of dissenting organisations and networks which survived, the basis for the Toleration Act passed in the wake of the Revolution of 1689 and the English tradition of nonconformity.

P.S.

Read more of Dr Seaward’s blogs at the Reformation to Referendum: Writing a New History of Parliament blog site.

In February 1735 Parliament was faced with a petition lodged by the Scots representative peers about accusations of corruption in their recent elections. One of those to raise his voice in the matter was Francis Scott, 2nd duke of Buccleuch, who was one of the new batch of Scotch peers returned in the 1734 general election, and who wanted to know whether the intention was to deprive him of his seat. Buccleuch was not a particularly engaging character, dismissed by the later commentator Lady Louisa Stuart as ‘of mean understanding and meaner habits’. If rough around the edges, though, he was normally a valuable ministerial loyalist and for the remainder of the decade he proved a consistent follower of the administration.

In 1741, Buccleuch fell out with Walpole and voted for his removal from office. Unsurprisingly, he failed to make the cut for the ministerial list of Scots representatives for the 1741 election, but two years later he made a return to the Lords having been restored to the British peerage as earl of Doncaster. The bill re-granting him his titles was brought in by Lord Carteret at the king’s command on 11 March 1743 and skipped through the House without incident, passing on the 16th.

All of this may not have been of much account but for the fact that Buccleuch was the grandson of the duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, who had been executed following his failed rebellion against his uncle James II in July 1685. Monmouth had been stripped of his titles, which is why his descendants were known by their Scottish honours, which they owed to his wife, as duchess of Buccleuch in her own right.

When Monmouth died on the block in spectacularly grisly fashion, with him had died the hopes of a number of Protestants who had been eager to see him displace James II on the throne. For some of them, Monmouth had been the true heir of Charles II. Soon after the Restoration when his marriage to Lady Anne Scott was being arranged, a process was begun under Scots law for Monmouth to be granted letters of legitimation and it was probably to this that should be attributed the beginning of rumours that Charles intended to acknowledge him as his legitimate son. Nothing of the kind happened, but at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, and others agitated for Charles to acknowledge Monmouth as his heir. There were even moves to have the king’s ‘marriage’ to Lucy Walters (who had died prior to the Restoration in 1658) declared formally in Parliament. In spite of solemn undertakings made by Charles that he had never married Walters, the myth endured bolstered by rumours of the existence of a mysterious ‘black box’ containing documents proving that the marriage had taken place.

The story of the black box was popularized in two tracts published by Robert Ferguson (known as ‘the Plotter’) in 1680 following an official enquiry launched by the court. The owner of the notorious receptacle was said to be Sir Gilbert Gerard, MP for Northallerton, and a supporter of exclusion. He was said to have been bequeathed it by his father-in-law, John Cosin, bishop of Durham (Lucy Walters’ confessor in the final years of her life). On his death, Cosin was said to have left instructions that the box was to be kept sealed until after Charles’s death, but Gerard had fallen prey to temptation and looked inside. There, it was believed he found proof that Cosin himself had married Charles and Lucy during the exile. Gerard was brought up to London in April 1680 and questioned by the privy council to discover what he had uncovered. Although he denied all knowledge, he was turned out of his offices. His experience proved the starting point for Ferguson’s pamphlets.

In the short term, the efforts made by Charles and (perhaps more to the point) James to close the story down were unsuccessful. Ferguson’s tracts remained in circulation and continued to inspire opposition. In 1682 a man was prosecuted in Dorset for insisting:

it could and should be proved that the king was married to the duke of Monmouth’s mother and that nought but knaves, rascals, and fools signed the Dorsetshire address to the king [Zook, 101]

Tales continued once Charles was dead. The 1685 election for Westminster saw one of Gerard’s distant relations standing as one of the Whig candidates, only to meet with noisy opposition at the poll with the crowd parading a box on a pole and calling out ‘No black box! No excluder!’ There were similar demonstrations at Newark and at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where replica black boxes were ritually burnt.

Monmouth’s defeat and William of Orange’s successful invasion ultimately rendered the tales of the black box irrelevant. By the time of the Hanoverian succession, little more was said about it, though the episode did feature in Roger Coke’s 1719 publication, A Detection of the Court and State, which promised to reveal ‘many SECRETS never before made publick’. It may have been an indication of how secure George II felt by 1734 that he had no compunction in permitting the admission to Parliament of a man some might have felt to be the true heir to the throne; and even more so that in 1743 he was willing to restore him to some of the titles stripped from his rebellious grandfather.

Choosing to reward Buccleuch may have been made easier because the duke inspired relatively little affection. Louisa Stuart was not alone in dismissing him as an unappealing sort of character. Towards the end of his life he was said to have:

plunged into such low amours, and lived so entirely with the lowest company, that his person was scarcely known to his equals, and his character fell into utter contempt.

He continued his downward trajectory and, following the death of his first wife, married a washerwoman. When he died in April 1751, Buccleuch’s demise was overlooked amid the constitutional crisis caused by the recent death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he was buried ‘very meanly’ in the chapel of Eton.

There is, however, a corollary to all of this. While Ferguson the Plotter had, undoubtedly, been willing to popularize the story of the black box to please his patrons, Shaftesbury and Monmouth, in his first tract he had perhaps given away his true feelings on the issue, one which could in no way displease the Hanoverians:

‘Tis of no great concernment, who is the immediate heir in the regal line, if we do but consider that the Parliament of England hath often provided a successor to the Government, when the interest of the Publick hath required it, without the least regard to such Punctilios.

RDEE

Further Reading:

James Ferguson, Robert Ferguson: the plotter, or the secret of the Rye House conspiracy and the story of a strange career
Robert Ferguson, ‘A letter to a person of honour concerning the Black Box’ (1680)
Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England

Charles II entered London in triumph on 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday. Three weeks earlier Parliament had proclaimed him as King. He had landed at Dover on 25 May and had made stops at Canterbury and Rochester en route to the capital. On 29 May he was greeted at St George’s Fields in Southwark by the lord mayor of London. The huge procession, mostly formed of the army, the London trained bands and the City worthies, crossed London Bridge and then proceeded through London to Whitehall. The parade took seven hours to pass through the City and it was already early evening by the time the king reached Whitehall.

This was unquestionably the king’s big day. But Parliament was not overlooked. The royalist view that Parliament had not made Charles king was now, in theory, also the official one. Parliament’s role, however, could hardly be downplayed. It made considerable sense for Charles to play up the fact that, ostensibly at least, he was returning with Parliament’s full support. These events were therefore choreographed to highlight this.

Both Houses had been very busy since inviting the king back. Both had sent delegations to Holland to deliver to him their formal invitations for his return. These parliamentary commissioners did so at The Hague on 16 May. Their colleagues back at Westminster meanwhile made the practical arrangements. Residents in the royal palaces were kicked out and speedy repairs were made to Whitehall. New furnishings were ordered and steps were taken to seize any royal possessions that had been sold off following Charles I’s execution. A new crown (almost certainly the present St Edward’s Crown) was commissioned. The arms of the republic were everywhere replaced with the royal arms and the Scottish standards captured at the battles of Dunbar and Worcester were removed from Westminster Hall. New flags were ordered for the navy.

A start was also made on some of the trickier bits of business. The king had left it to Parliament to decide who would be exempted from any general pardon. Both Houses would spend months arguing over this, but the indemnity bill was introduced in the Commons as early as 9 May. Attempts were made to round up those who had been involved in the late king’s execution and who had not already fled abroad. The land settlement would prove just as controversial. An easy first step was to legislate to abolish feudal tenures, confirming what the Long Parliament had done in 1646. A bill to do this had also already been introduced. In what was surely a pointed reminder to the king, the Commons spent the afternoon of 29 May, exactly when Charles was riding through London, debating a bill to confirm Parliament’s privileges.

The heavy workload at Westminster may actually have dissuaded the two Houses from travelling to Dover to welcome the king. On 22 May the Lords agreed to go as a group, but that plan seems to have been quickly abandoned. That same day the Commons gave leave to George Monck to go, and although he was given permission to take other MPs with him, there was no general rush to join him. Instead, the Lords and the Commons each sent letters of welcome. So there were no formal representatives from either House on the beach at Dover on 25 May. Monck greeted Charles alone – albeit watched by a vast crowd of spectators and with representatives of the town in attendance – and he did so very much as the lord general who had made all this possible.

Parliament waited for the king to come to them. They thus met for the first time only on 29 May. That welcome however formed the climax of that day’s events. There was no doubt that this was the encounter that really mattered. When Charles reached Whitehall, peers and MPs had already assembled in the Banqueting House, the palace’s largest and most splendid ceremonial space. It had, of course, also been the scene of Charles I’s execution. Charles II met the two Houses immediately. The two Speakers, the 2nd earl of Manchester and Sir Harbottle Grimston, each greeted him with speeches hailing his assumption of his royal office and assuring him of Parliament’s loyalty. The MPs present then queued to kiss the king’s hand.

Two days later, the king’s brothers, the dukes of York and Gloucester, took their seats for the first time in the Lords. Finally, on 1 June Charles II attended Parliament and in the traditional manner, from the throne in the Lords’ chamber, he granted the royal assent to the handful of bills the two Houses had ready for him. For better or worse, substantially or just superficially, the ‘old normal’ of rule by king, Lords and Commons had been restored.

AB

Further reading

A. Keay, The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (2008)

J. Uglow, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration (2009)

Click to read part one and part two of Dr Barclay’s 1660 series. Keep up to date with the research of our Commons 1640-1660 project through the ‘James I to Restoration‘ section of our blog.

When the new Parliament met on 25 April 1660 few doubted that it would restore the monarchy. The real question was whether it would try to impose any conditions on Charles II. Lots of people, including quite a few MPs, still hoped that some variation on the deal discussed with Charles I at Newport on the Isle of Wight in 1648 might be possible. The late king had been willing to make concessions on church government and control of the militia. That his more flexible son might agree something similar seemed plausible enough.

Charles II made the first move. The new Parliament had spent its opening days doing nothing much. Then on 1 May the exiled king declared his hand. His emissary was his gentleman of the bedchamber, Sir John Granville. Sir John was, just as importantly, also George Monck’s cousin. Those two advantages, which ensured that he was trusted by both Charles and Monck, had enabled him to arrange the secret agreement between the exiled king and the soldier who was now the most powerful man at Westminster. The message Granville brought with him and which he now presented to the Lords and the Commons had been prepared on Monck’s advice.

Charles was careful not to overplay his hand. The Declaration of Breda, ostensibly issued from that Dutch town on 4 April, left open some crucial details. Its most famous promise, that any religious settlement would allow ‘liberty for tender consciences’, specifically that ‘no man shall be disquieted or called in question for any differences of opinion in matter of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’, managed to be as vague as it sounded generous. The final decisions on the extent of  any pardons to be granted and on how to untangle the problem of the confiscated estates were to be left to Parliament. Only his promise to pay the army was completely unambiguous.

Granville’s presentation of the Declaration to the Commons on 1 May was a moment of pure parliamentary theatre. It was all the more so for being very carefully staged. Granville appeared at the bar of the House and handed over the Declaration. Already treating it as if it was a message for the monarch, MPs stood and removed their hats while it was read. William Morice then moved that they welcome what it said. All present would have known the significance of this; Morice was closely associated with Monck and so was clearly acting as his spokesman. What was then known to almost no one, however, was that he had been the only other person present when Granville had secretly met Monck and that the king had already promised to appoint him as the secretary of state. Morice’s suggestion was accepted. The Commons unanimously and without hesitation agreed that a letter be written to the king to tell him of ‘the great and joyful sense of this House of his gracious offers’. They also voted £50,000 to him.

This is invariably seen as the moment Charles II was restored. In almost every practical sense, it was. The Commons had decisively declared in his favour and they had implicitly done so on the basis of the Declaration of Breda. Reinforcing this was that both Houses immediately agreed that the Declaration should be printed. Hopes of any wider restrictions on the king’s power were now irrelevant. But Charles II was not actually proclaimed until a week later on 8 May. Why the delay?

Organising the public reading of a proclamation could be done quickly and, in the case of a normal accession, that was often done within hours of the late monarch’s death. Of course, this was not a normal accession. There was no privy council, but, although there was a council of state, no one seems to have objected that it was Parliament that now took the initiative. Other details were trickier. Both Houses had to prepare their formal replies. The Commons completed the text of its letter on 2 May but did not decide which MPs would deliver it until 5 May. The Lords did not finalise their reply until 3 May but appointed its messengers at the same time. That these delegations then had to make arrangements to travel over to the Netherlands may have been a further reason for delay and in the end they set out only on 11 May.

However, another factor was probably the decisive reason for the delay. The king had also sent letters containing his Declaration addressed to the army and the navy. These were forwarded by Parliament on 1 May. It however took until 7 May before the Commons received confirmation from the general-at-sea, Edward Montagu, that the Declaration had been read to the fleet. Only then did arrangements begin for the king to be proclaimed. The proclamation was finalised by the two Houses the following day, enabling it to be read in Palace Yard at Westminster, at Temple Bar and at the Royal Exchange. Crucially, the text of the proclamation made it explicit that, as Charles had been king de jure since his father’s death, this was not the beginning of a new reign, an obvious but very convenient fiction.

AB

Further reading

Andrew Barclay ‘George Monck’s role in the drafting of the Declaration of Breda’, Archives, 35, no. 123 (2010), 63-7

Paul H. Hardacre, ‘The genesis of the Declaration of Breda, 1657-1660’, Journal of Church and State, 15, No. 1 (1973), 65-82

Further biographies of George Monck, Edward Montagu and William Morice are being prepared by the Commons 1640-1660 project.

For more blogs about the mid-seventeenth century see our James I to Restoration page.

Three short Parliaments – those that assembled in March 1679, in October 1680, and March 1681 – are collectively referred to as the ‘Exclusion’ Parliaments, for they were dominated by the issue of the exclusion from the throne of Charles II’s heir, his brother, James, Duke of York. The astonishing revelation that York had undergone conversion to the Roman Catholic faith – confirmed in 1672, but widely known well before – was the central element in a political crisis that destabilised the English government for much of the rest of Charles II’s reign. The issue of how England’s Protestant church could be shielded from harm under a head who was of a different religion – and of a religion that most English people assumed was dedicated to its destruction – was mixed with other anxieties about the drift of Charles II’s government, particularly its deference to the powerful monarchy of France’s Louis XIV and its willingness to bypass some of the constraints of law and Parliament in pursuit of its other goals. The government’s use of doubtful prerogative powers to lift the restrictions on religious worship outside the Church of England in 1672 was taken by some as an indication of how easy it would be to reintroduce Catholicism. But the Church had other enemies as well – Protestant nonconformists, who had to choose between seeing the Duke of York as a threat to Protestantism, or an ally against the Anglicans.

Attempts to find ways of dealing with the prospect of a Catholic king started in the previous Parliament, the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, which had been originally elected in 1661 and was still in existence in 1678. But over the summer of that year, two crucial events wrecked what remained of the equilibrium of Charles II’s government. The first was the discovery of the body of a Westminster magistrate, apparently murdered, led to a series of increasingly lurid allegations about a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the king – the so-called ‘Popish Plot’. The second was the exposure of a secret request made by the king’s chief minister, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby, to the French for a financial subsidy.

The ensuing uproar, exploited very effectively by prominent politicians, including Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and Denzil Holles, Lord Holles, led to the eventual dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament at the beginning of 1679 and the summoning of a new one – something which these politicians had long demanded. Charles II thought the concession would calm the situation. It didn’t: instead, the Commons revived their predecessors’ attempts to impeach Danby, initiated the trial of Catholic members of the House of Lords supposed to be involved in the ‘Plot’, and, most dangerously as far as the king was concerned, passed a bill that would exclude York entirely from the succession.

At the end of May, the king pulled the plug on the session, dissolving the Parliament in July and calling new elections for a replacement. Though the elections were held in August and September, Charles delayed its actual assembly, ignoring a huge campaign of popular petitioning requesting that the new Parliament be allowed to sit. Not until October 1680, more than a year later, did it actually meet. But when it did, it resumed its inquiries into the ‘Plot’ and its trials of Catholic peers, and revived its bill for York’s exclusion. In early January 1681 the king prorogued, then dissolved, this Parliament, just as he had done with its predecessor, and called another. The new Parliament met at Oxford in March, moved out of London in response to concerns about public order. It fared no better than its predecessors. It sat only for a week before the introduction of another bill for the exclusion of York brought the king dramatically to Parliament to dissolve it, swiftly and without warning in order to prevent any attempt to frustrate the dissolution. Charles did not summon another Parliament before his death in 1685, and the accession of his brother James, whom the politicians had tried so hard to bar from the throne. In his remaining four years, Charles would benefit from a backlash against the atmosphere of political crisis that they had generated, built on the claim that many of them had conspired to create a new revolution, like that of 1641, to destroy the monarchy itself.

There is no doubt that the crisis of 1678-81 – known traditionally as the ‘Exclusion’ crisis – was as profound a struggle over the government of England as any, save, perhaps, for the Civil War itself. There is no doubt that it brought about a deep and in some respects lasting polarisation of politics – into camps known for eternity as ‘Tory’ (supporters of the Church and the King) and ‘Whig’ (those on the other side). But is it right to call it the ‘Exclusion’ crisis, and these three Parliaments the ‘Exclusion Parliaments’? For while the exclusion bills were at their centre, they were about far more than the future James II. Some historians have emphasised how the crisis split the country along religious lines. Supporters of the Church of England tended to uphold the right of the Duke of York to succeed, despite his Catholicism; its opponents tended to be his opponents too. Others have pointed out that to stress ‘Exclusion’ and the emergence of ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’ is to emphasise the role of some of the most divisive politicians, especially the earl of Shaftesbury, and to obscure other proposed solutions to the problem of James (including explicit limits on his power). It’s fair to say that political crises are complex events involving many people with different concerns and objectives, bringing together issues and problem that may have been long brewing. But as the most audacious and dramatic idea on the table, presented by a politician, Shaftesbury, with a genius for grabbing, and holding political attention, Exclusion accurately enough indicates the depth and character of the crisis that paved the way to Revolution within a decade.

P.S.

Further reading:

• Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 1991)
• Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81 (Cambridge, 1994)

See Paul’s blog for more posts relating to his current research project, From Reformation to Referendum: Writing a New History of Parliament.

The Parliament elected in April 1661 was designed to sweep away the last vestiges of the English Revolution and restore the monarchy to its pre-Civil War glory. It was the Convention of 1660, elected a year earlier, that had brought the Interregnum to an end, summoning Charles II back from his continental exile; but men who had fought for the king and his father had been deliberately excluded from it. As far as the king was concerned, the Convention needed to be replaced as soon as possible with something more vigorously reactionary. His new Parliament fitted the bill: ‘no man’, wrote his lord chancellor and chief minister, the earl of Clarendon, ‘could wish a more active spirit to be in them, than they were in truth possessed with’.

Among its principal preoccupations was religion. The new Parliament did all it could to support the revival of the episcopal Church of England: it brought bishops back into the House of Lords, from whence they had been removed in 1641; it passed a new Act of Uniformity, imposing qualifications on parish clergy designed to winkle out those who felt that the English church remained too close to the old, Catholic, religion; it passed a Corporation Act, intended to remove from local government anyone who might sympathise with the ideas about church or state that had brought about the revolution; and it created a set of new and draconian penalties against people who attended informal religious services outside the structures of the Church – the Conventicle Acts, the ‘quintessence of arbitrary malice’, as they were called by Andrew Marvell, the celebrated poet, a Member of the Parliament who was a key figure among the ‘Presbyterians’, as they were called, whose efforts to oppose such legislation were, though well-organised, unavailing.

To call it the ‘Cavalier’ Parliament was to associate it with the royalists of the Civil War. ‘Cavalier’ was a word taken from Spanish, which originally meant simply a cavalryman, but had acquired connotations of the sort of loud, confident and aggressive behaviour that you might expect of young seventeenth-century gentlemen, and had then been applied to the king’s supporters in the war. In fact, the word seems not to have been applied to the 1661 Parliament until much later. The only seventeenth century uses of the phrase I’ve found either use it for the assembly of royalist Members of the 1641 Long Parliament that met at the king’s headquarters at Oxford in 1644, or for the Irish Parliament elected in 1661. Though the phrase was used for this Parliament in 1745 it only seems to have become common towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The Parliament is also referred to as the ‘Long Parliament’ or the ‘Pensionary Parliament’. ‘Long Parliament’ was a mocking comparison with the Parliament that had fought Charles I, and pointed to the fact that the 1661 Parliament would remain in existence for longer than its reviled predecessor had done: it was in use by the 1780s and probably much earlier. The phrase ‘Pensionary Parliament’ was much more popular. In use as early as 1679, and common in the 1690s and well after, it referred to the systematic efforts of government ministers from the mid-1660s onwards to buy the support of Members through the wholesale distribution of pensions and offices. Their campaigns were given wide publicity by their opponents, who put out pamphlets listing in outraged or sardonic terms the benefits Members received from the court. The most famous, A Seasonable Argument to Perswade All the Grand Juries in England, to Petition for a New Parliament. Or, A List of the Principal Labourers in the Great Design of Popery and Arbitrary Power, published in1677, was attributed to Andrew Marvell, whose Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England was a vigorous denunciation of what he saw as the systematic corruption of an entire Parliament.

How Cavalier was the Cavalier Parliament? Out of the 617 men who sat in the House of Commons in the first six years of the Parliament, between 1661 and 1667, more than half (330) had in some way shown their support for Charles I or Charles II during the Civil War. A much smaller number – less than 10% (56) – had served on the side of Parliament. But since the Parliament lasted for nearly eighteen years, its royalism would, over time, fade, as the generation that had directly experienced the Civil War diminished: and while support for the government was shored up for a while by the much-criticised distribution of places and pensions, it came under enormous strain as suspicions grew that Charles II hankered after French-style absolutist government and had warmer feelings for the Catholic Church than for the Church of England. The news that his heir, his brother James, had himself become a Catholic, created a crisis over ways of neutralising the threat to the Church that eventually persuaded the king that his loyal Parliament of 1661 favoured his interests no longer. He dissolved it in 1679.

PS

Further reading

• History of Parliament website: http://historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1660-1690/parliament/1661
• Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661-1667 (Cambridge, 1989)
• D.T. Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons, 1663-1674 (Manchester, 1966)
• Annabel Patterson, The Long Parliament of Charles II (London, 2008)

Posthumous pardoning has recently become a powerful and emotive element in public discussion. Classes of people thought to have suffered injustice at the hands of the state have attracted champions who have argued that their offences should be effaced from the record as unjust or morally monstrous. Two examples are the British soldiers of 1914-18, shot for acts which at the time were considered to have amounted to cowardice or desertion; and the activists for women’s suffrage punished for acts of criminal damage or civil disobedience. These are campaigns for selective pardoning, but in 1660, in what were unique circumstances, the concept of pardon was one which gripped the attention of everyone in public life in England and Wales.

After a period of nearly 20 years of disruption to kingly rule – civil war between king and parliament, followed by a republic and then the Cromwellian protectorate – Charles Stuart had returned from exile to re-establish the monarchy and to reign as Charles II. In May that year he issued from Breda, in the Netherlands, a Declaration which promised ‘a free and general pardon’ to all his people, giving them 40 days from publication to ‘lay hold on’ his pardon, meaning in practice that people should explicitly and publicly accept it by affirmation or in writing. There were many of the new king’s subjects with much to be nervous about. Many had fought against him in the civil war, in either high or low military rank. Others had benefited from confiscations of the royal estates or from the estates of his supporters, or from the lands and tithes of the Church of England, of which the king was head. The most nervous of all were the men who in January 1649 had signed the death of warrant of the new king’s father, Charles I, or made speeches in Parliament or delivered sermons from the pulpit against the king in particular or monarchy in general. Although his promise was for a general pardon to everyone, ‘how faulty soever’, Charles imposed one important condition, which was that any exceptions to the rule of a general pardon would be determined by Parliament. So if any people were to be excluded from the pardon, it would be decided by Parliament who they would be.

The Declaration of Breda, as it came to be known, was dated 4 April 1660, and the Parliament that would determine some of the exceptions to the Declaration assembled three weeks later. While most people were content to trust that the Declaration would apply to them, others were unwilling to take any chances, and made contact with the Speaker of the Commons, the memorably-named Sir Harbottle Grimston, to make their own effusive Declarations of loyalty to the new king. Some of these were former MPs, such as John Claypoole, who had married the daughter of Oliver Cromwell. He had risen through this connection not only to achieve credibility as an MP in two Parliaments and then as a member of Cromwell’s equivalent of the House of Lords, but also to be master of the lord protector’s horse, a position of influence at the Cromwellian court. It was Claypoole’s membership, by marriage, of the Cromwell family that gave rise to his sense of insecurity. Others felt exposed because of unsympathetic neighbours. Sampson Lort, who had been elected in controversial circumstances to Parliament in 1659, for Pembroke, had encouraged his militia troop to carry a banner with the republican motto, ‘no king, no lords we are engaged’. Neither of these men had as much to fear as John Hutchinson, who had signed the death warrant in 1649. It was Hutchinson’s wife, Lucy, author of a celebrated posthumous memoir of her husband, who wrote in her husband’s name, but against his wishes, to the Speaker expressing his true repentance for his part against the late king. According to Lucy herself, it was the only occasion on which she ever disobeyed her husband. For all three of these, their self-abasements worked, and their pardons were secure. Not for Hutchinson the ignominy and agony of the traitor’s death by hanging and ritual dismemberment while still alive.

The king’s pardon was a general one, but by making Parliament central to the process of bestowing it, the king had cleverly demonstrated his respect for the institution which had fought against, tried and executed his father before defeating and banishing Charles II himself. He had also just as cleverly distanced himself to some extent from the process and from judgments as to guilt or innocence. The concept of the general pardon also imposed on all in public life the responsibility for clearing their own names. Some quickly and correctly foresaw that the declarations, speeches and letters of June 1660 were a prelude to a longer process of rehabilitation of most; low-level harassment for a substantial minority; and arrest, trial and public execution for a very small number. A few, such as Col. John Jones, a signatory of the death warrant in 1649, failed to realise the danger they were in, despite the Declaration of Breda. He was arrested on 2 June while out walking for exercise in London, and went to his death as regicide a little over four months later.  A fortnight after Jones’s arrest, the king issued a proclamation which acknowledged those who had actively decided to ‘lay hold on’ his pardon, and which now extended it to all his subjects regardless of any such initiative on their part. ‘Notorious delinquents’ were made an exception, and the scene was set for the trials of the regicides.

SR

Keep up to date with the progress of The Commons 1640-1660 project here. 

The impeachment of the earl of Clarendon in 1667 is little remembered these days; but it was an enormously significant moment both in the history of impeachment, and in Restoration politics. Sacked from the lord chancellorship at the end of August in the aftermath of the naval debacle at Chatham and the hasty conclusion of a peace with the Dutch, Clarendon was clearly in danger of more serious retribution from political enemies who had waited a long time for their revenge, and from former colleagues for whom he could become a convenient scapegoat for military failure. Even the king, whose principal minister Clarendon had been for so long, and who had dithered over his dismissal, was now increasingly irritated by a man whose undoubted talents had always come with an enormous self-assurance bordering on arrogance. Clarendon may have been vulnerable, but he also possessed a still-powerful ally: the king’s brother and heir, James, duke of York, who, infatuated, had married Clarendon’s daughter secretly in 1660.

The events of the autumn of 1667 exemplified several themes that would become familiar in later Restoration politics. One of them was a widespread hostility to York and a desire to ensure that he would never succeed to the throne. It was early on rumoured that the moves against Clarendon were linked to a plan by the king to legitimise his bastard son, the duke of Monmouth, who would then become the heir apparent. Another was the French invasion of the Spanish-held territories in the Netherlands. Spanish and French ambassadors were involved in intrigues on the one side to seek English help in resisting the incursion; on the other to prevent it.

An impeachment had been widely talked of in advance of the opening of the parliamentary session on 10 October, though it was never clear whether it was ever intended to actually carry a prosecution through, or whether it was designed merely to frighten his allies, including York, into quiescence. An address to the king thanking him for Clarendon’s removal, voted by both Houses, was the first indication of action against the former chancellor. On 23 October there were motions in both Houses testing the ground: surprisingly, that in the Commons was unsuccessful, an early indication that Clarendon would not be unsupported. For some time the issue hung in the balance in the lower House. On the one hand, a group of powerful courtiers led a determined campaign to present a case for impeachment to the Lords, with a demand that Clarendon be arrested and imprisoned immediately. On the other, a coalition of defenders including York’s friends, pointed out that no evidence had been produced of an impeachable offence. The impasse developed into a crisis, as Clarendon’s opponents put increasing pressure on his allies, and the word grew that York was the man who was really targeted.

At this point, however, York was laid low with smallpox, a crucial blow to his capacity to fight Clarendon’s corner, and the king may have taken the opportunity to make his hostility to his former servant more explicit, encouraging MPs to support the prosecution. On 8 November the Commons resolved that there was sufficient evidence to proceed to examine a series of accusations, though they were still having trouble with making them appear to be treason. On the 9th, the earl’s supporters struck back, defeating the claim that his alleged advice that the rule of law be suspended during the crisis of the summer had amounted to treason. But on the following day, the House agreed that another claim – that he had betrayed secrets to the king’s enemies – was treason. The rather preposterous allegation– based on a hint from the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, anxious to back the side that appeared, at the moment, to be anti-French – had yet to be proved.  But it was enough to enable an impeachment for ‘treasons and other high crimes and misdemeanours’ to proceed, and to be presented to the Lords.

The struggle moved to the upper House, where Clarendon had plenty of defenders. They were soon at loggerheads with the Commons, over the Lords’ refusal to send Clarendon to the Tower. The charges, the peers told MPs, were insufficiently specific to warrant immediate imprisonment.

The impeachment was rapidly developing into a political crisis, with deadlock and procedural wrangling between the two Houses, and the king becoming increasingly infuriated that Clarendon had not just disappeared. Broad hints were dropped that he should leave the country, a step that the earl was deeply unwilling to take, reluctant to appear to admit guilt. It may have been York himself who finally persuaded him to take a boat for France on the evening of Saturday 30th November, leaving behind him a ‘petition’ to the House of Lords which was more of a vindication of his conduct and which when read (though ‘admired for the style’) was regarded as a ‘almost as full of impudent lies as of lines’. Despite his attempt to justify himself, Clarendon’s departure was indeed seen as an admission of guilt, though it seemed at the time the only way to prevent the escalation of a nasty political crisis. Clarendon would never return to England, settling in southern France, most of the time in Montpellier (‘going to Montpellier’ would become a euphemism for the consequences of political failure). He died in 1674.

Clarendon’s fall and exile marked a new phase in Restoration politics, in which the concerns over the character and ideas of the king’s heir grew more explicit and increasingly destructive. 1667 had been the first serious skirmish in a political struggle that would become more serious with the realisation that the duke of York (as well as his wife, Clarendon’s daughter – to Clarendon’s own horror) had converted to Catholicism. It would climax first in the battles over the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne in 1678-81, and then in the crisis of James’s reign and toppling from power in the Revolution of 1688-9.

PS

You can read more about Clarendon’s fall from grace in Paul Seaward’s earlier blogs: Chatham and the failure of English Politics and The Dismissal of Clarendon.

On the evening of 30th August 1667 one of the two secretaries of state, Sir William Morrice, was sent by the King to the lord chancellor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon in his grand, newly-completed palace of Clarendon House off Piccadilly, to demand that Clarendon surrender to him his seal of office. Morrice, who Clarendon wrote ‘had no mind to the employment’, took the Great Seal, tucking it in its richly embroidered purse under his arm ‘like a bagpipe’, as the Scottish secretary the earl of Lauderdale gleefully wrote, and delivered it back to King Charles II in his private apartments in Whitehall. It was the end of the political career of one of the most diligent servants of the king and his father. Originally one of the parliamentary critics of the government of Charles I, the then Edward Hyde had moved towards the king’s camp as he was alienated by the drift to confrontation of the leadership in the Commons. He became one of the most important administrators of the royalist cause in Oxford during the Civil War, and then shared the poverty and frustration of Charles II’s pre-Restoration exile. Confirmed in his dominance of the king’s counsels after the Restoration, he had been heaped with honours and piled high with wealth. Despite his service, his success bred resentment.

The dismissal was the culmination of a series of events set off by the disastrous naval humiliation in June in the Medway, when the Dutch had delivered a tremendous rebuke to England’s absurdly unrealistic tactics in attempting to negotiate an end to the second Anglo-Dutch war. With immense daring, they sailed upriver to Chatham and burnt and captured some of the greatest ships of the English navy – laid up there because the government had simply run out of money. Clarendon wrote of the chaos and confusion that followed:

those who … were then present in the galleries and privy lodgings at Whitehall, whither all the world flocked with equal liberty, can easily call to mind many instances of such wild despair and even ridiculous apprehensions, that I am willing to forget, and would not that the least mention of them should remain.

A peace was, unsurprisingly, rapidly concluded. The attribution of blame preoccupied English politics for much longer.

Clarendon was an obvious target. He had, it was conceded, opposed the war in the first place, and the catastrophic failure to set out the fleet in early 1667 could not be directly attributed to him: its origins lay in the natural disasters of 1665 (Plague) and 1666 (the Fire of London), and in part in the role of the king’s close companion, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, in coordinating opposition to the government in the parliamentary session of 1666-7, although Clarendon’s insistence on protecting Irish interests from parliamentary complaints had probably not helped. But in a long career in which he was the dominant and rarely tactful voice in the royal counsels, Clarendon had made many enemies; and he was seen by some at court as an obstruction to more effective decision-making. And he could be his own worst enemy: having apparently hinted at a wish to retire from power following the death of his wife just before the Chatham disaster, he then hastily retracted when it seemed the suggestion might be enthusiastically taken up. The king took a long time to make up his mind to send away an adviser who must have seemed part of the furniture, if an infuriating one. Indeed, by the time it actually happened, most observers had assumed he had been dissuaded from the idea.

For many in the court it was a victory, for many of his greatest detractors were courtiers whose ambitions for honours, lands or cash had been thwarted by one who, they believed, had reaped considerable rewards himself. Clarendon himself told of how the king’s household servant, Baptist May (a man he regarded as odious), went to see the king, fell on his knees and kissed his hand, telling him ‘that he was now king, which he had never been before’. Lauderdale echoed the point in a letter to a political ally: ‘now the king is the king himself’.  The most famous account is a story written down by Pepys about a visit Clarendon made to the king at Whitehall a couple of days before he was dismissed – a visit which many thought would result in his sacking. The countess of Castlemaine, the king’s notoriously scheming mistress, who had still been in bed in her Whitehall apartments at noon, ‘ran out in her smock into her Aviary looking into Whitehall garden, and thither her woman brought her her nightgown and [she] stood joying herself at the old man’s going away. And several of the gallants of Whitehall (of which there was many staying to see the Chancellor return) did talk to her in her Bird Cage; among others, Blanckford, telling her she was the Bird of Paradise’. There is a famous nineteenth century picture of the scene: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ward-the-disgrace-of-lord-clarendon-after-his-last-interview-with-the-king-scene-at-n00431

Clarendon would eventually be impeached by the House of Commons in a series of debates of high drama (of which more later), before eventually quitting the country for a second, and bitter, exile.

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