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The previous lesson closed with the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 — the moment at which the ambiguities of the Restoration settlement began, quietly, to reassert themselves. This lesson takes up the story there and carries it to the death of Charles II in February 1685. It is the stretch of the reign in which the two questions the settlement of 1660 had deliberately left open — the reach of the royal prerogative, and the place of religion in the state — forced their way back to the surface, culminating in the greatest political crisis between the Civil War and the Revolution: the Exclusion Crisis of 1678 to 1681. Along the way England acquired, for the first time, something recognisable as organised political parties — the Whigs and the Tories — and a public politics of print, petition and partisan argument that would never wholly disappear again.
The reign of Charles II after 1670 is, in a real sense, the prologue to 1688 as much as the epilogue to the Interregnum. The problems that would destroy his brother James II were all present, in embryo, in these years: a king suspected of Catholic and French sympathies; a prerogative that reached, through the suspending power, towards the setting-aside of statute; a Parliament increasingly determined to police the boundaries of royal authority; and above all the terrifying prospect of a Catholic heir. What is striking is that Charles II survived all this, dying securely on his throne, where his father had gone to the scaffold and his brother would go into exile. Explaining that survival — and asking whether it was a genuine achievement or merely a postponement of the reckoning — is the analytical heart of the lesson. It requires us to weigh the king's own political skill against the structural forces at work, and to decide whether the "stability" of the later reign was a solid settlement or a personal conjuring trick that could not outlast the conjuror.
Key enquiry: Why did the buried tensions of the Restoration settlement — over the prerogative and over religion — return so dangerously in the 1670s, and how far was Charles II's survival of the Exclusion Crisis a genuine restoration of royal authority as against a fragile personal triumph that left the underlying problem of a Catholic succession unresolved for his brother to detonate?
The fall of the Earl of Clarendon in 1667 had left Charles served not by a single dominant minister but by a group of five, nicknamed — from the initials of its members — the Cabal (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale). The Cabal was never a unified ministry; its members intrigued against one another, held divergent religious views, and were not all party to the king's deepest secrets. But it is associated with the phase of policy that grew out of the secret Treaty of Dover, and understanding that policy is essential to grasping why the 1670s became so combustible.
In 1672, on the eve of the Third Anglo-Dutch War — fought, under the terms of Dover, as France's ally against the Protestant Dutch — Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence. By his own prerogative he suspended the penal laws against both Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics, permitting the former to worship in licensed public meeting-houses and the latter to worship in private. The Declaration can be read in two ways, and a strong answer holds both in view. On the one hand it expressed Charles's genuine, if intermittent, preference for a broad toleration and his wish to conciliate the Dissenters. On the other it advanced, under cover of that toleration, a relief of his fellow-monarch's co-religionists the Catholics, and — most dangerously of all — it asserted a constitutional principle the political nation could not accept: that the king might, by prerogative alone, set aside statutes passed by King, Lords and Commons together.
Parliament's response, when it met in 1673, was decisive and constitutionally momentous, and it deserves to be understood as one of the pivotal episodes of the whole period.
| Measure | Detail and significance |
|---|---|
| Denial of the suspending power | The Commons resolved that "penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by Act of Parliament" — a flat denial that the prerogative could override statute law on religion. Under intense pressure, and needing supply for the Dutch war, Charles withdrew the Declaration in March 1673. |
| The Test Act (1673) | Parliament then passed the Test Act, requiring all holders of civil and military office to take Anglican communion, to swear the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and to make a declaration against transubstantiation — the specifically Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. Its purpose was to flush Catholics out of public life. |
| The exposure of James | The Test Act's most sensational casualty was the king's own brother and heir, James, Duke of York, who resigned his office as Lord High Admiral rather than take the test — thereby publicly confirming, for the first time, that the heir to the throne was a Roman Catholic. |
The significance of 1673 for the breadth study can hardly be overstated. The constitutional principle established — that the prerogative could not suspend statute in matters of religion — pointed straight towards the confrontations of 1685 to 1688, when James II would revive precisely the suspending power his brother had been forced to abandon, and towards the Bill of Rights, which would declare that power illegal for good. And the public revelation of James's Catholicism converted an abstract anxiety about the succession into a concrete and pressing fear. From 1673 onwards, every thoughtful observer knew that, in the ordinary course of nature, a Catholic would one day wear the crown. The Exclusion Crisis was, in a sense, the political nation's five-year attempt to escape that knowledge.
From 1674 the leading minister was Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, whose approach was almost the opposite of the Cabal's. Where the Cabal had been associated with toleration, France and covert Catholicism, Danby built his power on the reverse: staunch Anglicanism, hostility to France, and the systematic management of Parliament in the Crown's interest. Danby's methods are historically important because they mark a new stage in the relationship between Crown and Parliament.
To reinforce the Protestant credentials of the regime, Danby arranged in 1677 the marriage of James's elder daughter and heir presumptive, the Protestant Mary, to the Dutch Protestant champion William of Orange — a match of the greatest long-term consequence, for it was this William who would land at Torbay eleven years later. In the short term the marriage was meant to reassure Protestant opinion; in the long term it placed a Protestant claimant, backed by a foreign army, in the direct line of succession.
In the autumn of 1678 the accumulated fears of the decade — of popery, of France, of a Catholic heir — were detonated by a fabrication. Titus Oates, a serial liar and disgraced clergyman, together with an accomplice, swore to the existence of an elaborate "Popish Plot": a supposed Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles, massacre Protestants, put the Catholic James on the throne, and re-establish Roman Catholicism by force. The plot was, from beginning to end, an invention. But it fell upon ground so thoroughly prepared that its very implausibility did not save it, and the way a baseless rumour could convulse the nation is itself one of the most revealing facts about the political culture of the period.
Two developments turned Oates's perjury into a national panic. First, the magistrate before whom he had sworn his depositions, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was found dead in mysterious circumstances in October 1678 — apparently murdered — and the coincidence seemed to confirm that dark forces were indeed at work. Second, the discovery of compromising correspondence belonging to Edward Coleman, secretary to the Duchess of York, revealed genuine (if far less sinister) contacts between English Catholics and the French court, lending a spurious credibility to Oates's wilder claims. Mass hysteria followed. Perhaps thirty-five Catholics, entirely innocent of the imaginary conspiracy, were executed on perjured evidence over the following three years, among them the Jesuit provincial and, as late as 1681, the Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett — the last Catholic martyr to be executed in England.
The true significance of the Popish Plot lies not in its fictitious details but in what it triggered. It provided the opening — the atmosphere of terror and suspicion — in which the parliamentary opposition, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, could launch a sustained campaign to achieve what it had long wanted: the exclusion of James from the succession. Danby, meanwhile, was destroyed by a separate but simultaneous blow — the revelation, by the renegade Ralph Montagu, of letters showing the anti-French minister soliciting French subsidies on the king's behalf. Impeached and discredited, Danby fell, and with him the king's carefully built Court party. Charles was left, at the start of 1679, facing the most dangerous political situation of his reign.
The Exclusion Crisis turned on a single, momentous question: could Parliament alter the hereditary succession to the crown in order to bar a Catholic? Around that question crystallised, for the first time in English history, two organised and recognisably modern political parties.
The struggle over three successive Exclusion Bills (1679, 1680, and 1681) forced the political nation to take sides, and the two sides acquired names — each, revealingly, a term of abuse flung by its opponents. "Whig" derived from the Scottish Covenanter rebels (the "Whiggamores"); "Tory" from Irish Catholic bandits. That the labels stuck is a measure of how bitter the division was.
| Whigs | Tories |
|---|---|
| Supported Exclusion — held that Parliament could and should alter the succession to bar a Catholic, since the safety of the Protestant religion overrode strict hereditary right | Opposed Exclusion — held the hereditary line to be divinely ordained and inviolable; to tamper with it was to repeat the sacrilege of 1649 |
| Drew support from Protestant Dissenters, City of London merchants, and anti-Catholic, anti-French opinion | Drew support from the Anglican clergy and gentry, and from all who dreaded a return to "1641" and civil war |
| Emphasised parliamentary right, the "original contract", and the Protestant interest; organised through the Green Ribbon Club and a torrent of pamphlets, petitions and processions | Emphasised divine right, indefeasible hereditary succession, and the duty of passive obedience; rallied to the defence of Church and Crown |
The emergence of these parties is one of the most significant developments of the whole breadth study, and it is worth pausing on why it matters. Before the Exclusion Crisis, English politics had been a matter of shifting factions and personal connections; after it, there existed two durable, ideologically defined tendencies, contesting elections, organising in the constituencies, and appealing through print to a public opinion beyond the walls of Parliament. This was a permanent change in the texture of political life. The party framework created in 1679 to 1681 would structure the Revolution of 1688, the settlement of 1689, and the politics of the following century. When we ask, in a later lesson, whether 1688 was a "conservative" or a "revolutionary" event, we are in part asking a question that the Whig–Tory division of the Exclusion Crisis first made possible.
For two years the crisis ran in Shaftesbury's favour. The Whigs commanded large majorities in three successive Parliaments; the propaganda war — with its pope-burning processions, its mass petitions, and its flood of print — mobilised opinion on an unprecedented scale; and the pressure on Charles to abandon his brother was immense. That the king nonetheless emerged victorious, with the Whigs broken and the succession secured, was the product of a combination of his own political skill and a shift in the national mood.
| Factor in Charles's victory | Analysis |
|---|---|
| The king's tactical patience | Charles refused every version of Exclusion but repeatedly prorogued and dissolved Parliament to break the Whigs' momentum, playing for time and declining to be stampeded into a concession he was determined never to make. |
| The Tory reaction | As the crisis dragged on, the memory of the 1640s worked in the king's favour. Moderate opinion came to fear that the Whigs, with their petitions, their crowds and their assault on the hereditary principle, were the real revolutionaries — that Exclusion led back to civil war. This "Tory reaction" rebuilt a Church-and-King party around the throne. |
| French subsidies | A fresh secret subsidy from Louis XIV in 1681 freed Charles from his financial dependence on Parliament at the critical moment, allowing him to dissolve the Oxford Parliament in March 1681 and to govern the last four years of his reign without calling another. |
| The collapse of the Whigs | With Parliament gone and the tide turned, Shaftesbury was arrested (though a London grand jury threw out the charge) and fled into exile, dying in 1683. The discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683 — a genuine conspiracy by a handful of extremists to assassinate the royal brothers — allowed a further crackdown, the execution of Whig leaders such as Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, and the remodelling of borough charters to secure Tory control of future Parliaments. |
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