The reign of Charles II: the Clarendon period

Clarendon

Until 1667 the king’s chief minister was his Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, created earl of Clarendon in 1661. In the reign of Charles I he had been seen as the face of constitutional royalism - a believer in a balanced constitution rather than an absolute monarchy. From the mid 1640s he became the future Charles II’s guardian - a position Charles came increasingly to resent. He saw his former tutor as stuffy and self-righteous and resented his attempts to influence his policies. 

Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon
Public domain

The Braganza marriage

In 1661 Clarendon secured the marriage of Charles II to Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of King João IV of Portugal. He regarded this as a great diplomatic coup. Since 1640 Portugal had been engaged in a struggle with the crumbling Spanish Empire for her independence. She was also a major colonial power. Catherine's dowry was Tangier (which would give England a Mediterranean base), Bombay (which would secure the trade of the Indies) and 2 million cruzados (c.£300,000). This marriage was encouraged by France, which offered £50,000.


(In 1668 Spain recognized Portuguese independence partly as a result of pressure from England.)

Catherine of Braganza
by Peter Lely
Public domain

In May 1662 the twenty-three-year old Catherine reached Portsmouth and she and Charles were married in two ceremonies, one Roman Catholic (and secret) and the other Anglican (conducted by Archbishop Sheldon). 

But the uncrowned queen was the maîtresse en titre, Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemaine, who had been appointed lady of the bedchamber. She bore him Charles a child every year between 1661 and 1665. 

Barbara Palmer (née Villiers)
Lady Castlemaine, Duchess of Cleveland

The Braganza marriage failed in its primary purpose because it failed to produce children. Catherine miscarried in 1666, 1668 and probably in 1669, after which the king seems to have given up hope of a child by her. 

This failure rebounded on Clarendon. It was implausibly argued that he knew Catherine was barren and had arranged the marriage so that his own grandchildren would inherit the throne. 

But though the marriage failed in its primary purpose it had great significance for British history. The Tangier garrison was unsustainable, and was abandoned in 1682, but Bombay provided a toe-hold on India's west coast. In 1668 the Crown ceded it to the East India Company. 

The Cavalier Parliament 

On 29 December 1660 the Convention was dissolved, and on 8 May 1661 the so-called 'Cavalier Parliament' met. The elections reflected the growing tide of pro-royalist feeling in the country. One hundred of the new MPs had sat in the Long Parliament and had a legacy of experience that would ensure that they would not be a rubber stamp for royal authority.

However the parliament made no attempt to challenge the king’s right to appoint privy councillors and state officials or fill Church and local government posts. By the Militia Acts of 1661 and 1662 it conceded that the Crown not Parliament controlled the militia - this had been the great area of dispute between Charles I and the Long Parliament.

The Triennial Act of 1664 repealed that of 1641 and replaced it with an emasculated version: parliament ought to be held every three years, but there was no mechanism to force the king to do so.

But in the early 1660s two things prevented Charles from exercising the same powers as his cousin, Louis XIV: lack of ability and financial resources. He was reluctant to get down to the tedious business of government. Perhaps his greatest failing as a ruler was his financial extravagance and dissolute living which made it hard for ministers to persuade MPs to grant him more money. Even a less extravagant monarch would have had problems. The Cavalier Parliament recognised that the Convention Parliament had not given the king enough money. They added the hearth tax (May 1662) but this was insufficient.

Nevertheless, the restored monarchy had considerable potential powers and if could sort out its finances it would be in a very strong position.

The Cavalier Parliament and religion

The Parliament had been elected in an atmosphere of royalist reaction and was composed of Anglican Cavaliers bent on revenge. The anti-Puritan reaction was proceeding apace. After the Restoration Baptist meeting houses in London were attacked by the mob. John Bunyan was arrested by a local magistrate for preaching in the fields in November 1660. He refused to give an undertaking not to preach and was imprisoned on and off for the next twelve years.

Meanwhile the Anglican Church was being restored. During the winter of 1660-1 Anglican ministers who had been ejected in 1640 returned to their livings under the patronage of Anglican gentry - and these same gentry were elected to Parliament.

Within ten days of its first sitting the Cavalier Parliament restored bishops to the Lords. The Commons voted 228/103 that the Solemn League and Covenant should be burned by the public hangman and that all MPs were to take the sacrament according to the Church of England. 

From 5 April to 23 July, 1661, a final attempt was made to include Presbyterians within the Church of England. The Savoy Conference was held at the Bishop of Lincoln’s lodgings in the Strand but this broke down amid bitter wranglings over revisions to the Prayer Book. Charles and Clarendon’s wish for a more inclusive Church was thwarted.

In April 1662 Parliament accepted the revised Prayer Book prepared by the restored Convocation (clerical parliament). A series of Acts of Parliament, rather unfairly known as the Clarendon Code, imposed severe penalties on religious nonconformists (increasingly known as Dissenters). 


(a) The Corporation Act (1661) remained on the statute book until 1824): it set up commissions empowered to evict all the municipal officials who did not swear oaths of allegiance and non-resistance, declare the Solemn League and Covenant invalid and take the Anglican sacrament.

(b) The Act of Uniformity (1662): restricted all positions in the Church, schools and universities to Anglicans; all teachers and holders of ecclesiastical posts who did not make the necessary oaths and declarations by St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) were to be ejected. Nearly 1,000 clergy, schoolmasters and university teachers were expelled in what was known as 'the Great Ejection'.

(c) The Conventicle Act (1664): prohibited all assemblies not held in accordance with the Prayer Book and attended by five or more adults who were not members of the household in which the service was conducted. Offenders were subject successively to fines, imprisonment and transportation as an indentured labourer. For the purposes of the act ‘moderate’ Presbyterians were treated on the same level as ‘extreme’ Quakers.

(d) The Five Mile Act (1665): forbade all preachers and teachers who lived within five miles of any town or city and all ejected clergy from travelling within five miles of the parish where they had been incumbents.

This most ‘loyal’ of parliaments had imposed a religious policy contrary to the wishes of the king and his chief minister. Acquiescence was the price Charles II had to pay for his grants of parliamentary supplies.

The First Declaration of Indulgence

Despite the evidence of the Parliament’s fervent Anglicanism, Charles on 26 December 1662 issued a Declaration of Indulgence,  announcing that he intended to adhere to his Breda promise of ‘liberty to tender consciences’ and requested that Parliament prepare a bill which would allow him to suspend enforcement of the act on an individual basis. This was in response to his own desire for inclusivity, to pressure from his mother and to petitions from Presbyterians and Independents. However, his Declaration caused a parliamentary storm which could have been foreseen. Charles was claiming a suspending power - his right as Governor of the Church of England to suspend laws ecclesiastical matters. But the Commons would not accept this and when the new parliamentary session met in February 1663 he was forced to withdraw the Declaration and issue a new proclamation against priests and Jesuits.

This highlights a major problem in assessing Charles II’s policy.

1. It was clear that his power base lay in the Church of England and the royalist Anglican squires.
2. Charles in effect rebuffed this power base by introducing his Declaration of Indulgence.
3. He was unable to stand firm by his policy of toleration and forced to back-track. He was in a classic no-win situation.

It is possible that, resentful of his dependence on the Church of England he toyed with a policy of building up another power base of Dissenters and Roman Catholics.

The triumph of Anglicanism

The anachronistic term ‘Anglican’ is not helpful in the period up to 1640 because of the legal fiction that everybody was a member of the Church of England. However, after 1660 it was one church among others, though it was the only one with full legal recognition. The experience of the Interregnum, when the Church was banned, showed that it had become deeply rooted in popular culture, and that many people felt a great attachment to their parish church and to the prayer book. Though reduced to ruins in the early 1640s it emerged triumphant in the early 1660s, restored on a tidal wave of Anglican loyalism, which, as has been shown, neither Charles II nor Clarendon could resist.

The survival of Dissent

However, Anglicanism was no longer the only product on the market. For all its harshness, the Clarendon Code gave legal recognition to Protestant dissent, which flourished despite efforts to eradicate it.  Some areas had particularly heavy concentrations; between 25 and 40 per cent of the inhabitants of Coventry were nonconformists as were over 33 per cent of the inhabitants of Lewes. There were significant numbers of Dissenters in Norwich and Bristol and among the rural clothworkers of Wiltshire.

A book of some of the farewell
sermons delivered by the ejected clergy.
Dissenters disagreed on many issues
but they were united by a common
experience of persecution.

But this should not underestimate the sufferings of Dissenters, of whom John Bunyan is the best known. Quakers and Baptists suffered especially because of their refusal to take the oath of allegiance. Quakers were also vulnerable because of their refusal to give ‘hat honour’, to say ‘you’ to superiors and to pay tithes. 

The title page of Pilgrim's Progress
1678: the greatest work of
prison literature in the
English language

Conclusion

1. The Clarendon Code was an attempt to impose an Anglican monopoly. Neither the king nor his chief minister wanted it but they were unable to stand against a fiercely royalist parliament. 
2. But far from outlawing Dissent, the Code was an acknowledgement of its existence. The Elizabethan vision of a united Protestant Church was no longer a reflection of reality. The Church-Chapel divide was entrenched in English life.