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Томас Бабингтон Маколей
The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 2

CHAPTER VIII

Consecration of the Nuncio at Saint James's Palace; his public Reception—The Duke of Somerset—Dissolution of the Parliament; Military Offences illegally punished—Proceedings of the High Commission; the Universities—Proceedings against the University of Cambridge—The Earl of Mulgrave—State of Oxford—Magdalene College, Oxford—Anthony Farmer recommended by the King for President—Election of the President—The Fellows of Magdalene cited before the High Commission—Parker recommended as President; the Charterhouse—The Royal Progress—The King at Oxford; he reprimands the Fellows of Magdalene—Penn attempts to mediate—Special Ecclesiastical Commissioners sent to Oxford—Protest of Hough—Parker—Ejection of the Fellows—Magdalene College turned into a Popish Seminary—Resentment of the Clergy—Schemes of the Jesuitical Cabal respecting the Succession—Scheme of James and Tyrconnel for preventing the Princess of Orange from succeeding to the Kingdom of Ireland—The Queen pregnant; general Incredulity—Feeling of the Constituent Bodies, and of the Peers—James determines to pack a Parliament—The Board of Regulators—Many Lords Lieutenants dismissed; the Earl of Oxford—The Earl of Shrewsbury—The Earl of Dorset—Questions put to the Magistrates—Their Answers; Failure of the King's Plans—List of Sheriffs—Character of the Roman Catholic Country Gentlemen—Feeling of the Dissenters; Regulation of Corporations—Inquisition in all the Public Departments—Dismission of Sawyer—Williams Solicitor General—Second Declaration of Indulgence;

the Clergy ordered to read it—They hesitate; Patriotism of the Protestant Nonconformists of London—Consultation of the London Clergy—Consultation at Lambeth Palace—Petition of the Seven Bishops presented to the King—The London Clergy disobey the Royal Order—Hesitation of the Government—It is determined to prosecute the Bishops for a Libel—They are examined by the Privy Council—They are committed to the Tower—Birth of the Pretender—He is generally believed to be supposititious—The Bishops brought before the King's Bench and bailed—Agitation of the public Mind—Uneasiness of Sunderland—He professes himself a Roman Catholic—Trial of the Bishops—The Verdict;

Joy of the People—Peculiar State of Public Feeling at this Time

THE marked discourtesy of the Pope might well have irritated the meekest of princes. But the only effect which it produced on James was to make him more lavish of caresses and compliments. While Castelmaine, his whole soul festered with angry passions, was on his road back to England, the Nuncio was loaded with honours which his own judgment would have led him to reject. He had, by a fiction often used in the Church of Rome, been lately raised to the episcopal dignity without having the charge of any see. He was called Archbishop of Amasia, a city of Pontus, the birthplace of Strabo and Mithridates. James insisted that the ceremony of consecration should be performed in the chapel of Saint James's Palace. The Vicar Apostolic Leyburn and two Irish prelates officiated. The doors were thrown open to the public; and it was remarked that some of those Puritans who had recently turned courtiers were among the spectators. In the evening Adda, wearing the robes of his new office, joined the circle in the Queen's apartments. James fell on his knees in the presence of the whole court and implored a blessing. In spite of the restraint imposed by etiquette, the astonishment and disgust of the bystanders could not be concealed. 278 It was long indeed since an English sovereign had knelt to mortal man; and those who saw the strange sight could not but think of that day of shame when John did homage for his crown between the hands of Pandolph.

In a short time a still more ostentatious pageant was performed in honour of the Holy See. It was determined that the Nuncio should go to court in solemn procession. Some persons on whose obedience the King had counted showed, on this occasion, for the first time, signs of a mutinous spirit. Among these the most conspicuous was the second temporal peer of the realm, Charles Seymour, commonly called the proud Duke of Somerset. He was in truth a man in whom the pride of birth and rank amounted almost to a disease. The fortune which he had inherited was not adequate to the high place which he held among the English aristocracy: but he had become possessed of the greatest estate in England by his marriage with the daughter and heiress of the last Percy who wore the ancient coronet of Northumberland. Somerset was only in his twenty-fifth year, and was very little known to the public, He was a Lord of the King's Bedchamber, and colonel of one of the regiments which had been raised at the time of the Western insurrection. He had not scrupled to carry the sword of state into the royal chapel on days of festival: but he now resolutely refused to swell the pomp of the Nuncio. Some members of his family implored him not to draw on himself the royal displeasure: but their intreaties produced no effect. The King himself expostulated. "I thought, my Lord," said he, "that I was doing you a great honour in appointing you to escort the minister of the first of all crowned heads." "Sir," said the Duke, "I am advised that I cannot obey your Majesty without breaking the law." "I will make you fear me as well as the law," answered the King, insolently. "Do you not know that I am above the law?" "Your Majesty may be above the law," replied Somerset; "but I am not; and, while I obey the law, I fear nothing." The King turned away in high displeasure, and Somerset was instantly dismissed from his posts in the household and in the army. 279

On one point, however, James showed some prudence. He did not venture to parade the Papal Envoy in state before the vast population of the capital. The ceremony was performed, on the third of July 1687, at Windsor. Great multitudes flocked to the little town. The visitors were so numerous that there was neither food nor lodging for them; and many persons of quality sate the whole day in their carriages waiting for the exhibition. At length, late in the afternoon, the Knight Marshal's men appeared on horseback. Then came a long train of running footmen; and then, in a royal coach, appeared Adda, robed in purple, with a brilliant cross on his breast. He was followed by the equipages of the principal courtiers and ministers of state. In his train the crowd recognised with disgust the arms and liveries of Crewe, Bishop of Durham, and of Cartwright, Bishop of Chester. 280

On the following day appeared in the Gazette a proclamation dissolving that Parliament which of all the fifteen Parliaments held by the Stuarts had been the most obsequious. 281

Meanwhile new difficulties had arisen in Westminster Hall. Only a few months had elapsed since some Judges had been turned out and others put in for the purpose of obtaining a decision favourable to the crown in the case of Sir Edward Hales; and already fresh changes were necessary.

The King had scarcely formed that army on which he chiefly depended for the accomplishing of his designs when he found that he could not himself control it. When war was actually raging in the kingdom a mutineer or a deserter might be tried by a military tribunal and executed by the Provost Marshal. But there was now profound peace. The common law of England, having sprung up in an age when all men bore arms occasionally and none constantly, recognised no distinction, in time of peace, between a soldier and any other subject; nor was there any Act resembling that by which the authority necessary for the government of regular troops is now annually confided to the Sovereign. Some old statutes indeed made desertion felony in certain specified cases. But those statutes were applicable only to soldiers serving the King in actual war, and could not without the grossest disingenuousness be so strained as to include the case of a man who, in a time of profound tranquillity at home and abroad, should become tired of the camp at Hounslow and should go back to his native village. The government appears to have had no hold on such a man, except the hold which master bakers and master tailors have on their journeymen. He and his officers were, in the eye of the law, on a level. If he swore at them he might be fined for an oath. If he struck them he might be prosecuted for assault and battery. In truth the regular army was under less restraint than the militia. For the militia was a body established by an Act of Parliament, and it had been provided by that Act that slight punishments might be summarily inflicted for breaches of discipline.

It does not appear that, during the reign of Charles the Second, the practical inconvenience arising from this state of the law had been much felt. The explanation may perhaps be that, till the last year of his reign, the force which he maintained in England consisted chiefly of household troops, whose pay was so high that dismission from the service would have been felt by most of them as a great calamity. The stipend of a private in the Life Guards was a provision for the younger son of a gentleman. Even the Foot Guards were paid about as high as manufacturers in a prosperous season, and were therefore in a situation which the great body of the labouring population might regard with envy. The return of the garrison of Tangier and the raising of the new regiments had made a great change. There were now in England many thousands of soldiers, each of whom received only eightpence a day. The dread of dismission was not sufficient to keep them to their duty: and corporal punishment their officers could not legally inflict. James had therefore one plain choice before him, to let his army dissolve itself, or to induce the judges to pronounce that the law was what every barrister in the Temple knew that it was not.

It was peculiarly important to secure the cooperation of two courts; the court of King's Bench, which was the first criminal tribunal in the realm, and the court of gaol delivery which sate at the Old Bailey, and which had jurisdiction over offences committed in the capital. In both these courts there were great difficulties. Herbert, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, servile as he had hitherto been, would go no further. Resistance still more sturdy was to be expected from Sir John Holt, who, as Recorder of the City of London, occupied the bench at the Old Bailey. Holt was an eminently learned and clear headed lawyer: he was an upright and courageous man; and, though he had never been factious, his political opinions had a tinge of Whiggism. All obstacles, however, disappeared before the royal will. Holt was turned out of the recordership. Herbert and another Judge were removed from the King's Bench; and the vacant places were filled by persons in whom the government could confide. It was indeed necessary to go very low down in the legal profession before men could be found willing to render such services as were now required. The new Chief justice, Sir Robert Wright, was ignorant to a proverb; yet ignorance was not his worst fault. His vices had ruined him. He had resorted to infamous ways of raising money, and had, on one occasion, made a false affidavit in order to obtain possession of five hundred pounds. Poor, dissolute, and shameless, he had become one of the parasites of Jeffreys, who promoted him and insulted him. Such was the man who was now selected by James to be Lord Chief justice of England. One Richard Allibone, who was even more ignorant of the law than Wright, and who, as a Roman Catholic, was incapable of holding office, was appointed a puisne judge of the King's Bench. Sir Bartholomew Shower, equally notorious as a servile Tory and a tedious orator, became Recorder of London. When these changes had been made, several deserters were brought to trial. They were convicted in the face of the letter and of the spirit of the law. Some received sentence of death at the bar of the King's Bench, some at the Old Bailey. They were hanged in sight of the regiments to which they had belonged; and care was taken that the executions should be announced in the London Gazette, which very seldom noticed such events. 282

It may well be believed, that the law, so grossly insulted by courts which derived from it all their authority, and which were in the habit of looking to it as their guide, would be little respected by a tribunal which had originated in tyrannical caprice. The new High Commission had, during the first months of its existence, merely inhibited clergymen from exercising spiritual functions. The rights of property had remained untouched. But, early in the year 1687, it was determined to strike at freehold interests, and to impress on every Anglican priest and prelate the conviction that, if he refused to lend his aid for the purpose of destroying the Church of which he was a minister, he would in an hour be reduced to beggary.

It would have been prudent to try the first experiment on some obscure individual. But the government was under an infatuation such as, in a more simple age, would have been called judicial. War was therefore at once declared against the two most venerable corporations of the realm, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The power of those bodies has during many ages been great; but it was at the height during the latter part of the seventeenth century. None of the neighbouring countries could boast of such splendid and opulent seats of learning. The schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow, of Leyden and Utrecht, of Louvain and Leipzig, of Padua and Bologna, seemed mean to scholars who had been educated in the magnificent foundations of Wykeham and Wolsey, of Henry the Sixth and Henry the Eighth. Literature and science were, in the academical system of England, surrounded with pomp, armed with magistracy, and closely allied with all the most august institutions of the state. To be the Chancellor of an University was a distinction eagerly sought by the magnates of the realm. To represent an University in Parliament was a favourite object of the ambition of statesmen. Nobles and even princes were proud to receive from an University the privilege of wearing the doctoral scarlet. The curious were attracted to the Universities by ancient buildings rich with the tracery of the middle ages, by modern buildings which exhibited the highest skill of Jones and Wren, by noble halls and chapels, by museums, by botanical gardens, and by the only great public libraries which the kingdom then contained. The state which Oxford especially displayed on solemn occasions rivalled that of sovereign princes. When her Chancellor, the venerable Duke of Ormond, sate in his embroidered mantle on his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian theatre, surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly presented to him as candidates for academical honours, he made an appearance scarcely less regal than that which his master made in the Banqueting House of Whitehall. At the Universities had been formed the minds of almost all the eminent clergymen, lawyers, physicians, wits, poets, and orators of the land, and of a large proportion of the nobility and of the opulent gentry. It is also to be observed that the connection between the scholar and the school did not terminate with his residence. He often continued to be through life a member of the academical body, and to vote as such at all important elections. He therefore regarded his old haunts by the Cam and the Isis with even more than the affection which educated men ordinarily feel for the place of their education. There was no corner of England in which both Universities had not grateful and zealous sons. Any attack on the honour or interests of either Cambridge or Oxford was certain to excite the resentment of a powerful, active, and intelligent class scattered over every county from Northumberland to Cornwall.

The resident graduates, as a body, were perhaps not superior positively to the resident graduates of our time: but they occupied a far higher position as compared with the rest of the community. For Cambridge and Oxford were then the only two provincial towns in the kingdom in which could be found a large number of men whose understandings had been highly cultivated. Even the capital felt great respect for the authority of the Universities, not only on questions of divinity, of natural philosophy, and of classical antiquity, but also on points on which capitals generally claim the right of deciding in the last resort. From Will's coffee house, and from the pit of the theatre royal in Drury Lane, an appeal lay to the two great national seats of taste and learning. Plays which had been enthusiastically applauded in London were not thought out of danger till they had undergone the more severe judgment of audiences familiar with Sophocles and Terence. 283

The great moral and intellectual influence of the English Universities had been strenuously exerted on the side of the crown. The head quarters of Charles the First had been at Oxford; and the silver tankards and salvers of all the colleges had been melted down to supply his military chest. Cambridge was not less loyally disposed. She had sent a large part of her plate to the royal camp; and the rest would have followed had not the town been seized by the troops of the Parliament. Both Universities had been treated with extreme severity by the victorious Puritans. Both had hailed the restoration with delight. Both had steadily opposed the Exclusion Bill. Both had expressed the deepest horror at the Rye House Plot. Cambridge had not only deposed her Chancellor Monmouth, but had marked her abhorrence of his treason in a manner unworthy of a scat of learning, by committing to the flames the canvass on which his pleasing face and figure had been portrayed by the utmost skill of Kneller. 284 Oxford, which lay nearer to the Western insurgents, had given still stronger proofs of loyalty. The students, under the sanction of their preceptors, had taken arms by hundreds in defence of hereditary right. Such were the bodies which James now determined to insult and plunder in direct defiance of the laws and of his plighted faith.

Several Acts of Parliament, as clear as any that were to be found in the statute book, had provided that no person should be admitted to any degree in either University without taking the oath of supremacy, and another oath of similar character called the oath of obedience. Nevertheless, in February 1687, a royal letter was sent to Cambridge directing that a Benedictine monk, named Alban Francis, should be admitted a Master of Arts.

The academical functionaries, divided between reverence for the King and reverence for the law, were in great distress. Messengers were despatched in all haste to the Duke of Albemarle, who had succeeded Monmouth as Chancellor of the University. He was requested to represent the matter properly to the King. Meanwhile the Registrar and Bedells waited on Francis, and informed him that, if he would take the oaths according to law, he should be instantly admitted. He refused to be sworn, remonstrated with the officers of the University on their disregard of the royal mandate, and, finding them resolute, took horse, and hastened to relate his grievances at Whitehall.

The heads of the colleges now assembled in council. The best legal opinions were taken, and were decidedly in favour of the course which had been pursued. But a second letter from Sunderland, in high and menacing terms, was already on the road. Albemarle informed the University, with many expressions of concern, that he had done his best, but that he had been coldly and ungraciously received by the King. The academical body, alarmed by the royal displeasure, and conscientiously desirous to meet the royal wishes, but determined not to violate the clear law of the land, submitted the humblest and most respectful explanations, but to no purpose. In a short time came down a summons citing the Vicechancellor and the Senate to appear before the new High Commission at Westminster on the twenty-first of April. The Vicechancellor was to attend in person; the Senate, which consists of all the Doctors and Masters of the University, was to send deputies.

When the appointed day arrived, a great concourse filled the Council chamber. Jeffreys sate at the head of the board. Rochester, since the white staff had been taken from him, was no longer a member. In his stead appeared the Lord Chamberlain, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave. The fate of this nobleman has, in one respect, resembled the fate of his colleague Sprat. Mulgrave wrote verses which scarcely ever rose above absolute mediocrity: but, as he was a man of high note in the political and fashionable world, these verses found admirers. Time dissolved the charm, but, unfortunately for him, not until his lines had acquired a prescriptive right to a place in all collections of the works of English poets. To this day accordingly his insipid essays in rhyme and his paltry songs to Amoretta and Gloriana are reprinted in company with Comus and Alexander's Feast. The consequence is that our generation knows Mulgrave chiefly as a poetaster, and despises him as such. In truth however he was, by the acknowledgment of those who neither loved nor esteemed him, a man distinguished by fine parts, and in parliamentary eloquence inferior to scarcely any orator of his time. His moral character was entitled to no respect. He was a libertine without that openness of heart and hand which sometimes makes libertinism amiable, and a haughty aristocrat without that elevation of sentiment which sometimes makes aristocratical haughtiness respectable. The satirists of the age nicknamed him Lord Allpride. Yet was his pride compatible with all ignoble vices. Many wondered that a man who had so exalted a sense of his dignity could be so hard and niggardly in all pecuniary dealings. He had given deep offence to the royal family by venturing to entertain the hope that he might win the heart and hand of the Princess Anne. Disappointed in this attempt, he had exerted himself to regain by meanness the favour which he had forfeited by presumption. His epitaph, written by himself, still informs all who pass through Westminster Abbey that he lived and died a sceptic in religion; and we learn from the memoirs which he wrote that one of his favourite subjects of mirth was the Romish superstition. Yet he began, as soon as James was on the throne, to express a strong inclination towards Popery, and at length in private affected to be a convert. This abject hypocrisy had been rewarded by a place in the Ecclesiastical Commission. 285

Before that formidable tribunal now appeared the Vicechancellor of the University of Cambridge, Doctor John Pechell. He was a man of no great ability or vigour, but he was accompanied by eight distinguished academicians, elected by the Senate. One of these was Isaac Newton, Fellow of Trinity College, and Professor of mathematics. His genius was then in the fullest vigour. The great work, which entitles him to the highest place among the geometricians and natural philosophers of all ages and of all nations, had been some time printing under the sanction of the Royal Society, and was almost ready for publication. He was the steady friend of civil liberty and of the Protestant religion: but his habits by no means fitted him for the conflicts of active life. He therefore stood modestly silent among the delegates, and left to men more versed in practical business the task of pleading the cause of his beloved University.

Never was there a clearer case. The law was express. The practice had been almost invariably in conformity with the law. It might perhaps have happened that, on a day of great solemnity, when many honorary degrees were conferred, a person who had not taken the oaths might have passed in the crowd. But such an irregularity, the effect of mere haste and inadvertence, could not be cited as a precedent. Foreign ambassadors of various religions, and in particular one Mussulman, had been admitted without the oaths. But it might well be doubted whether such cases fell within the reason and spirit of the Acts of Parliament. It was not even pretended that any person to whom the oaths had been tendered and who had refused them had ever taken a degree; and this was the situation in which Francis stood. The delegates offered to prove that, in the late reign, several royal mandates had been treated as nullities because the persons recommended had not chosen to qualify according to law, and that, on such occasions, the government had always acquiesced in the propriety of the course taken by the University. But Jeffreys would hear nothing. He soon found out that the Vice chancellor was weak, ignorant, and timid, and therefore gave a loose to all that insolence which had long been the terror of the Old Bailey. The unfortunate Doctor, unaccustomed to such a presence and to such treatment, was soon harassed and scared into helpless agitation. When other academicians who were more capable of defending their cause attempted to speak they were rudely silenced. "You are not Vicechancellor. When you are, you may talk. Till then it will become you to hold your peace." The defendants were thrust out of the court without a hearing. In a short time they were called in, again, and informed that the Commissioners had determined to deprive Pechell of the Vicechancellorship, and to suspend him from all the emoluments to which he was entitled as Master of a college, emoluments which were strictly of the nature of freehold property. "As for you," said Jeffreys to the delegates, "most of you are divines. I will therefore send you home with a text of scripture, 'Go your way and sin no more, lest a worse thing happen to you.'" 286

These proceedings might seem sufficiently unjust and violent. But the King had already begun to treat Oxford with such rigour that the rigour shown towards Cambridge might, by comparison, be called lenity. Already University College had been turned by Obadiah Walker into a Roman Catholic seminary. Already Christ Church was governed by a Roman Catholic Dean. Mass was already said daily in both those colleges. The tranquil and majestic city, so long the stronghold of monarchical principles, was agitated by passions which it had never before known. The undergraduates, with the connivance of those who were in authority over them, hooted the members of Walker's congregation, and chanted satirical ditties under his windows. Some fragments of the serenades which then disturbed the High Street have been preserved. The burden of one ballad was this:

"Old Obadiah Sings Ave Maria."

When the actors came down to Oxford, the public feeling was expressed still more strongly. Howard's Committee was performed. This play, written soon after the Restoration, exhibited the Puritans in an odious and contemptible light, and had therefore been, during a quarter of a century, a favourite with Oxonian audiences. It was now a greater favourite than ever; for, by a lucky coincidence, one of the most conspicuous characters was an old hypocrite named Obadiah. The audience shouted with delight when, in the last scene, Obadiah was dragged in with a halter round his neck; and the acclamations redoubled when one of the players, departing from the written text of the comedy, proclaimed that Obadiah should be hanged because he had changed his religion. The King was much provoked by this insult. So mutinous indeed was the temper of the University that one of the newly raised regiments, the same which is now called the Second Dragoon Guards, was quartered at Oxford for the purpose of preventing an outbreak. 287

These events ought to have convinced James that he had entered on a course which must lead him to his ruin. To the clamours of London he had been long accustomed. They had been raised against him, sometimes unjustly, and sometimes vainly. He had repeatedly braved them, and might brave them still. But that Oxford, the scat of loyalty, the head quarters of the Cavalier army, the place where his father and brother had held their court when they thought themselves insecure in their stormy capital, the place where the writings of the great republican teachers had recently been committed to the flames, should now be in a ferment of discontent, that those highspirited youths who a few months before had eagerly volunteered to march against the Western insurgents should now be with difficulty kept down by sword and carbine, these were signs full of evil omen to the House of Stuart. The warning, however, was lost on the dull, stubborn, self-willed tyrant. He was resolved to transfer to his own Church all the wealthiest and most splendid foundations of England. It was to no purpose that the best and wisest of his Roman Catholic counsellors remonstrated. They represented to him that he had it in his power to render a great service to the cause of his religion without violating the rights of property. A grant of two thousand pounds a year from his privy purse would support a Jesuit college at Oxford. Such a sum he might easily spare. Such a college, provided with able, learned, and zealous teachers, would be a formidable rival to the old academical institutions, which exhibited but too many symptoms of the languor almost inseparable from opulence and security. King James's College would soon be, by the confession even of Protestants, the first place of education in the island, as respected both science and moral discipline. This would be the most effectual and the least invidious method by which the Church of England could be humbled and the Church of Rome exalted. The Earl of Ailesbury, one of the most devoted servants of the royal family, declared that, though a Protestant, and by no means rich, he would himself contribute a thousand pounds towards this design, rather than that his master should violate the rights of property, and break faith with the Established Church. 288 The scheme, however, found no favour in the sight of the King. It was indeed ill suited in more ways than one, to his ungentle nature. For to bend and break the spirits of men gave him pleasure; and to part with his money gave him pain. What he had not the generosity to do at his own expense he determined to do at the expense of others. When once he was engaged, pride and obstinacy prevented him from receding; and he was at length led, step by step, to acts of Turkish tyranny, to acts which impressed the nation with a conviction that the estate of a Protestant English freeholder under a Roman Catholic King must be as insecure as that of a Greek under Moslem domination.