The death of one of the chief movers of the plot, Bedloe, in the summer of 1680, was a blow to the prosecution: it was not until the autumn of 1680 that it was decided by the House of Commons to move against Lord Stafford.
This particular peer was chosen because the witnesses against him had the greatest air of plausibility.6 Thus the verdict of guilty which was given against him was in a sense justified by the evidence produced – except that it happened to be perjured evidence. Witnesses happily swore that Lord Stafford had bribed them to kill the King, that Oates had delivered to him a commission to act as Paymaster-General for the Pope’s Army, and so on and so forth.
The condemnation of this decent and harmless old man was a blot on the age in which he lived. Already the ridiculous ‘Pumpkin Plot’, as it would be described satirically two years later in Otway’s masterpiece Venice Preserv’d, was beginning to be revealed for what it was: ‘It is indeed a Pumpkin-plot, which, just as it was mellow, we have gathered, and now we have gathered it, prepared it and dressed it, shall we throw it like a pickled cucumber out of the window?’ But in his prologue Otway spoke more soberly of the period of suspicion through which he had lived:
In these distracted times, when each man dreads
The bloody stratagems of busy heads;
When we have feared three years we know not what,
Till witnesses begin to die o’ the rot.
It was thanks to the ‘bloody stratagems of busy heads’ that, while the pampered Protestant ladies shivered in their coaches, Lord Stafford was executed on 29 December.fn1
His fellow lords remained in prison for the next five years, with the exception of Lord Petre, who was released earlier by death. But there were no cheers from the crowd when Lord Stafford’s head was held up by his executioner. The publication of his affecting last speech, the ‘Brief and Impartial Account’ (which was, unusually, not forbidden), brought further waves of uneasy sympathy. ‘My good Child,’ so Lord Stafford addressed his daughter Delphina, ‘this is the last time I shall write unto you, I pray God bless you. Your poor old Father hath this Comfort, that he is totally innocent of what he is accused of, and confident of God’s mercy….’7
Charles II told Thomas Bruce that Lord Stafford’s blood was on the heads of those who had brought about his murder – ‘I sign with tears in my eyes’; and he made clear his anger and disgust at those peers who had voted guilty, especially those whom he considered to be supporters of the Court.8 But he did not reprieve Stafford, as he would later fail to reprieve Oliver Plunkett. He could only remit the more extreme penalties for treason, including the traditional and disgusting mutilation – and even this merciful remission was criticized by the House of Commons, who wondered whether the sovereign had the right to grant it.
Then, on 18 January, the King dissolved Parliament and announced that the next Parliament would meet in March – and in Oxford.
It was an audacious move. It indicated that the King was at last prepared to take the initiative. Even before this, the Crown was at last mounting some kind of propaganda campaign, equivalent to the agile manoeuvres of Shaftesbury and his associates.fn2 The anti-Tory Green Ribbon Club had after all proved itself to be a more dangerous enemy than the anti-Popish mob. Noise merely battered the ears; propaganda wooed them. The point was there to be taken. There were the efforts of Roger L’Estrange in particular. Certainly the new Parliament turned out to be no more Whig in complexion than the previous one, and possibly slightly less – a notable improvement on the record of the previous two years, when each successive Parliament had marked a further setback for the King’s party. Against this background, the choice of Oxford, whose University was a secure Royalist nursery, was inspired. Here was no London mob, hostile to so many of the King’s entourage. Perhaps the setting was the suggestion of Danby, for although still immured in the Tower, he was now able to receive visits and thus proffer advice. Eighteen months before he had proposed: ‘Parliament to be called to some other place; the King to reside out of London’, in a memorandum.10
The removal of Parliament from the seething capital did not merely recognize the dangers threatening the monarchy; it also took advantage of the very wide powers remaining with the King. It is true that he had not felt himself able to save Lord Stafford, but a man who could choose the venue of Parliament without contradiction was still in a very strong position. There was much aggressive talk in the capital in February. One of the City MPs, Sir Thomas Player, a notorious anti-Papist, answered boldly when questioned at dinner as to why Parliament would not raise money to preserve Tangier and pay His Majesty’s debts.
‘Hang Tangier!’ he replied. ‘We resolve to raise no money to pay the whores at Whitehall and arbitrary government. And, as the King has called us to Oxford, we know the next will be to York, but for all that we will give him no money.’ Sir Thomas went on to say that the disposing of the Crown was in the Commons and as alterable as the exchanging of pipes between men, ‘and taking up pipes in his hand [he ex-]changed them’.11 For all this kind of public boasting, the Commons had not the ability to deny the King his choice. To Oxford, then, reluctantly but without the ability to resist, came the Whig leaders.
The King and Court did not come there directly, but took in the spring race meeting at Burford, twenty miles away in the stony, beautiful Cotswolds. It was a meeting at which the King’s twelve-stone heats for the royal Plate were due to be run. However, on this occasion Burford was transformed into something of a political Ascot; the Duke of Monmouth was amongst those who contested and there was a quality of nervous display about the whole occasion. Only the King himself kept up that appearance of relaxation which subsequently trapped his enemies and destroyed them. He hawked across the nearby fields and dined with Sir John Lenthall, son of the celebrated, if acquisitive, speaker of the Commonwealth House of Commons.
Once the Court reached Oxford, the scene was a curious mixture of the significant and the profane. Of course the Court was not unknown to the university city. Nor for that matter was Parliament. The King had been careful to reassure himself on that front, in an age when precedents, however dubious, were held to cover a multitude of sins. There were one or two (including Charles himself) who could remember Oxford as the seat of his father’s government nearly forty years ago; but it was only fifteen years since not only the whole Court but also Parliament had merrily romped off to Oxford to be out of danger at the time of the Plague. It was then that Barbara had given the King her Christmas present of a son, born at Merton College. Now both the Duchess of Portsmouth and Nell Gwynn were in attendance, as was the Queen; but the atmosphere was more political than lascivious, and there were to be no presents of such an exciting nature. Once again Merton was a Royalist stronghold, as were Christ Church and Corpus Christi. The Whigs concentrated on Balliol: Shaftesbury directed that ‘the younger sort of students’ should retire to make room for the elderly politicians.
There remained that concomitant of courtly pleasure, the theatre; while that concomitant of the theatre, a good row, was also to be found. The King’s Players petitioned furiously to be admitted, despite the claims of the Irish Company, which were supported by the Duke of Ormonde as Chancellor of Oxford University. The Irish were ‘a barbarous Mass’, said the King’s Players, and in the end this xenophobic view prevailed. More satisfactory than this squabble was the actual performance attended by the King on 19 March: Tamerlane the Great, by Charles Saunders, with an Epilogue by Dryden to make the message even more acceptable.12
Troops of soldiers as well as actors were present. Even more than the players they set the scene. It seems that their total did not exceed five hundred.13 Yet since they lined the roads on the way to Oxford, and lounged in the streets of the city itself, the impression of a trial of strength was there. The Whigs arrived at Oxford marked out by the bows of satin in their hats, blue and with the words ‘No Popery! No Slavery!’ woven into the material at a cost of two shillings a yard (these impudent bows were afterwards used
to arraign Shaftesbury).fn3 But the Whigs, like the King, were armed with something more serious than satin bows. They brought their own troops with them, if they did not have the possibility of a full standing army to back them. At St Mary’s, that same church where the young Charles had shocked his governor by laughing and eyeing the ladies in the congregation, the rival parties now carefully took their places according to political allegiance and eyed each other across the church.
And of course the Press was there. A flurry of news-writers gave the scene at Oxford something of the air of a modern party conference – except that on this occasion both parties were present. Cartoons played their part. So did lampoons. The Whigs made as much use as possible of the weapon of satire, some of it gross, in order to portray the King’s choice of Oxford as an act of absolutism. ‘The Raree Show’ depicted him as a man with a travelling peep-show, a pack of Parliamentary motions on his back, and the ‘Saints’ pulling him into the mire. The Duke of York was shown, more venomously, as a figure half-Jesuit and half-devil, setting fire to London.
Halloo! The Hunt’s begun,
Like Father, Like Son…
so ran the verse (before proceeding with considerable indecency). It was a gloomy and, as it turned out, inaccurate prediction. A loyal poem of the time, occasioned by seeing the ageing King walking near the river, was nearer the mark when it adjured him:
Go on, blest Prince! the power of years defy…14
The King’s opening speech to his new Parliament on 21 March was however placatory rather than defiant. It is true that there was a warning contained in the phrase, ‘I, who will never use arbitrary government myself, am resolved not to suffer it in others’ (the classic anti-Whig position). But at the time it seemed more important that the King stressed his continued affection for his dissident Lords and Commons: ‘No irregularities in parliaments shall make me out of love with them.’ It was a gruesome echo of those words uttered by the King shortly after his Restoration: ‘I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments. … Never King was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been.’ Then the King had felt quite a measure of love for the body which had shown the good taste to restore him; how, seventeen years later, love had well and truly grown cold, but the question remained how the King was to deal with his inconvenient old flame.
On the subject of religion and the succession, the King went out of his way to emphasize that he wanted ‘to remove all reasonable fears that may arise from the possibility of a Popish successor’s coming to the Crown’ and was therefore ready ‘to hearken to any such expedient, by which the religion might be preserved, and the monarchy not destroyed’. Was the King contemplating imposing some form of regency upon James, to be undertaken by William and Mary jointly, under the influence of Halifax? The words were at least capable of that construction and gave hope to the ‘moderate’ Exclusionists in the Commons, who believed that the King was to be counted amongst their number. But the rest rated this a ‘subtle and crafty’ speech, ‘so unexpected that they should be put upon taking new measures’.15
Shaftesbury, in the makeshift House of Lords sited in the Oxford Geometry School, wasted no time in returning to the attack. He demanded the consideration of a Bill, already passed by both Houses, which would give relief to nonconformists but not to Catholics. The House of Commons, in cramped quarters which gave rise to complaint, reverted to their favourite subject of Exclusion. Fatally – from their own point of view – the Commons felt no particular urgency. The debate was postponed until the following Saturday, 26 March, so that there might be an opportunity for compromise, possibly along the lines touched on in the King’s speech.
During the next few days the King, brilliantly, paid out the rope for the Whigs. Shaftesbury, for example, was encouraged to come right out with his own solution. This was the legitimization of Monmouth by a Parliamentary Bill. But of course this had the effect of dividing the opposition. Many Whigs quite sensibly preferred Mary of Orange (who was generally understood to represent rule by William) to Monmouth. Here was descent in the right line of a sort, since Mary, as James’ heiress, would receive the Crown one day in any case; while to know the wayward Monmouth was not necessarily to trust him in a position of authority. Time was rectifying the Whig distrust of William’s ‘Stuart’ authoritarianism; whatever the nature of the animal was, William clearly did not resemble his uncle the Duke of York, nor for that matter his grandfather, Charles I.
The House of Commons in the meantime concentrated on the fortunes of yet another Pumpkin Plotter, one Edward Fitzharris. In an age when plots were endemic, as poison to the age of the Borgias, Fitzharris does not shine out as a particularly fascinating figure. It remains obscure where his allegiances lay and as a plotter he lacked the baroque, if horrifying, imagination of Titus Oates. Nevertheless, Fitzharris was to have a significance beyond the revelations he proffered. In themselves, these were contradictory; on the one hand, Fitzharris knew of a plot whereby the Duke of York would kill the King; on the other hand, he possessed the draft of a pamphlet in which the King was accused of being a Papist like his brother. The Commons at Oxford decided that these matters were best dealt with by impeachment for high treason in the House of Lords, instead of by a straightforward trial.
The Lords declined to impeach Fitzharris. All the old antagonism between the two Houses – from which the King had already profited – was aroused all over again, and at the very moment when the latest Exclusion Bill was to be read in the Commons: Charles himself, advised by Halifax, even went so far as to suggest a regency of the Princess Mary. It was probably a gambit, for it was however about this time that Charles II made those remarks, quoted at the beginning of the chapter, on the subject of boldness and age, which concluded, ‘I do not fear the dangers and calamities which people try to frighten me with. I have the law and reason on my side.’ Under the circumstances, it seems more likely that the King was still paying out the rope for the Whigs to hang themselves than that he was actively contemplating such a regency. James, as he well knew, would never agree to such a humiliating proposition. To agree to it was tantamount to condemning the country to civil strife on his death – the one course he was determined to avoid.
This debate in the Commons took place on the Saturday, 26 March. Taking advantage of the Commons’ complaints of their uncomfortable accommodation, the King pleasantly suggested that they should meet the following Monday in the Sheldonian Theatre.
The Sunday was passed by the King in secret conference at Merton College.
On Monday the King took his place in the House of Lords, now set in the Hall of Christ Church. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his costume. But Thomas Lord Bruce, who knew him well, received ‘a most gracious smile’ and noted his exceptional bonhomie.16 As for the peers, they too were in ordinary dress, having been given no notice to put on their robes. Very few present were aware that the King’s own robes and crown, those trappings essential to a dismissal of Parliament, had been secretly smuggled into the building.
The King proceeded to send for the House of Commons, who were engaged in discussing the various precedents over Exclusions from the throne. Indeed, one of the members was in the very act of complaining at the isolation of Oxford in that respect: ‘Amongst our misfortunes in being called to this place, we are far remote from Records and Books.’ He went on, ‘I have heard of Record 4.E.3 where when the Earl of March—’ At that moment the official, Black Rod, arrived, to command the Commons’ attendance at the House of Lords.17 So off the Commons trooped, and the member’s clinching comparison with the past was never completed. The Commons however trooped off not so much disconsolately as eagerly, expecting some new offer or concession.
The entrance to the Hall was narrow, down a little flight of steps. There was a crush as the Commons pressed through it. The sight which met their eyes – the monarch attired in full robes and crown – was both unexpected and for one moment inexplicable. The Lords themselves had barely taken in the sudden trans
formation. There was a babble of voices, and in the confusion the Serjeant at Arms had to call for silence three times before the noise died away. Then the King in a single sentence ordered the Lord Chancellor to dissolve Parliament: ‘All the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end when the divisions at the beginning are such.’18
Finch carried out the King’s command. Charles promptly left the Hall. He had wasted neither time nor breath. These, the last words he would ever speak in Parliament, were brusque to the point of incivility. They came from a man otherwise famed for the graciousness of his manner. They represented the end of a downhill road and a long-declining relationship.
Afterwards, however, the King displayed ‘a most pleasing and cheerful countenance’ as he took off those smuggled robes. It was the MPs who greeted the news with ‘dreadful faces’ and ‘loud sighs’. The King, good humour fully restored, observed to Bruce, ‘I am now a better man than you were a quarter of an hour since; you had better have one King than five hundred.’19
Charles then dined in public, as was his custom; but he did so with exceptional rapidity. Then it was down the backstairs and into Sir Edward Seymour’s coach, standing ready. The King joined his own coach at the next stage, to which he had prudently sent it in advance. And so he went on to Windsor, along a route discreetly guarded – another precaution. The King’s Oxford troops clattered away unused. The Whigs, baffled and outpointed, had no choice but to leave as well, taking their own unused troops with them. Many of them had furnished their Oxford lodgings for a long stay – the measure of their astonishment.
Gradually Oxford became quiet again. Parliament never met again during the lifetime of King Charles II.
It is logical to suppose that the King arrived in Oxford with a rough plan of action already in his head. It was time to take on the Whigs. Given that he was prepared to act with decision, it was in fact an uneven match – not so much because the King was inordinately strong as because the Whigs were extremely weak. Nothing so far had gone right for them. In the House of Commons they had not succeeded in acquiring control of the Militia, for example, but had both alarmed and alerted the King by demanding it. Their battles with the House of Lords, also not yet conclusively won, occupied much of their attention, and had distracted them at several crucial moments. In terms of Whig policy, they concentrated their minds wonderfully on the question of the King’s Papist successor; yet the King was not a Papist himself and no one (pace Fitzharris) seriously supposed that he was.