The Exclusion Crisis

Engraving showing a mock-burning of the pope
17 November 1680
Public domain

The First Exclusion Parliament (March-July 1679)

Having dissolved the Cavalier Parliament, Charles had to summon a new parliament because he needed money - Louis XIV was refusing a subsidy. The general election of February 1679 swept away Danby’s supporters and much of the older generation. Half the MPs had never sat before. They were comparatively young and many of them had a high level of political consciousness. The Exclusion Crisis was about to begin.

Parliament met on 6 March and sat to 27 May. This parliament, the first new House of Commons for eighteen years, has achieved fame as the first Exclusion Parliament, sometimes known as the Habeas Corpus Parliament. In its initial sessions it secured the impeachment of Danby. The debates were as virulent as those on the impeachment of Strafford in 1641, and Danby had good reason to fear for his life. Charles advised him to leave the country, but, fearing Clarendon’s fate (he had died in exile), Danby refused. Though the articles of impeachment and the bill of attainder failed, he spent five years in the Tower.

Charles further tried to conciliate his opponents by bringing his former lord chancellor, the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Opposition MP William, Lord Russell (now MP for Bedfordshire), into the Privy Council and to agree to disband the standing army (but would he do it?). In May Parliament secured the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act, requiring judges to bring a prisoner to trial within a specific period of time (usually three days). Retrospectively this was a great step forward in human rights, though at the time its motive was more narrowly partisan: an attempt to tie the hands of a Catholic monarch. Charles further conciliated parliament by the delivery of the plot victims to execution.

What galvanized the opposition in this parliament was the public disclosure on 27 April 1679 of parts of the recently executed Edward Coleman’s correspondence which seemed to indicate that the duke of York was in negotiation with both France and Rome - and therefore by implication in the Popish Plot as well. On 27 April 1679 Russell addressed the Commons, declaring that if the succession were not changed

‘we must resolve when we have a Prince of the Popish Religion to be Papists, or burn ... and I will do neither’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

William, Lord Russell
Public domain

On 11 May Thomas Pilkington moved that James be impeached for high treason. On 15 May the Commons passed a resolution that a bill be brought in 'to disable the Duke of York to inherit the Imperial Crown of this Realm’. On 27 May Charles prorogued (and on 10 July dissolved) the parliament. In August an election was held for a new parliament but when it met it was prorogued until October 1680. (In the meantime Shaftesbury was dismissed in October 1679.)


By now the Popish Plot was running out of steam, but for a while the Exclusion Crisis was gaining strength. Would James be debarred from the succession. If so, would the heir be the king's illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth?

James, duke of Monmouth
after an oil painting by W. Wissing
Public domain

A moment of crisis

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this moment. The reign of Elizabeth I had been plagued by the succession question, and it was now again a live issue. As in 1572, Parliament was claiming the right to determine the succession to the throne on confessional lines – a claim that struck at the roots of divinely-appointed hereditary monarchy. It presented a particular challenge to the Church of England, which detested the duke of York's Catholicism but nevertheless believed that he was the rightful heir to the throne.

This issue became a very real one on in August 1679 when the king was taken ill and for two days he seemed to by dying - perhaps of a stroke. This made everyone realize that the succession was a genuine not a hypothetical question - James could become king. During the crisis, he rushed over from Brussels. In the same month another general election was held, which returned a Parliament dominated by exclusionists, which Charles immediately prorogued. In October, he sent James to Edinburgh, which turned out to be a smart move.

Scotland: the 'Killing Times'

The English Exclusion Crisis broadened into a British crisis. In the covenanting regions spasmodic guerrilla activity was followed on 3 May 1679 by the murder of Archbishop Sharp outside St Andrews. On 1 June John Graham of Claverhouse's dragoons tried unsuccessfully to attack a large armed conventicle at Drumclog in Lanarkshire. An Anglo-Scottish army was quickly assembled, commanded by Monmouth, routed the rebels at Bothwell Bridge on 22 June, killing between 200 and 400 covenanters. The rebellion was crushed with relative ease, but it showed that Charles could not command assent throughout his kingdoms. 

John Graham of Claverhouse
scourge of the Covenanters
Public domain

The Exclusion Crisis was conducted in England as if it were purely English - yet if James had been excluded from the English crown, he would still have been accepted by the Scots parliament. 

In the 1680s Scottish opposition to the crown became centred among people very different from the English whigs - these were the followers of a thirty-two- year old former schoolmaster, Richard Cameron. The Cameronians were defeated on 22 July 1680, Cameron was killed and the remaining leaders were founded up and executed in the following year.  In August 1681 the Scottish parliament gave its consent to a brutal campaign to crush the last remnants of dissent, it declared James heir to the throne, and through a test act rooted out covenanters from public office. The effect was to drive another fifty ministers from the church, predominantly in Lothian. The 'Killing Time' of the next few years saw the army unleashed on the covenanters and by 1683 summary executions were carried out on anyone denying the royal supremacy. Hundreds were killed, imprisoned, maimed, tortured, transported.  In 1684 the surviving Cameronians renounced their allegiance to the king.

'A Hind Let Loose'
a description of the sufferings of the Covenanters
during the 'Killing Time'
Public domain

However, there is another aspect to the Scottish story. Throughout much of 1679 to 1682 the Duke of York (who was Duke of Albany in Scotland) was in Edinburgh. This led to more repression of the covenanters but also to a Scottish cultural renaissance as a Stewart once more held court there. Much of Holyrood was rebuilt and the Order of the Thistle was revived. The mood in Scotland became more royalist and James became popular in the country. His stay coincided with a period of good harvests and rising prosperity.

Whigs and Tories

For the next two years the political nation was bitterly split on the question of exclusion. Underlying this question were the deep religious and political divisions that had existed since the Restoration: between those who were friendly to Protestant dissenters and intensely critical of the intolerant policies of the bishops, and those who were driven by a desire to protect the Church of England. In effect, this was a rerun of the crisis of 1641 which caused the civil war – a fact much noted by alarmed contemporaries.

By the spring of 1681 the terms Whigs and Tories were becoming widely used. Both were first used as insults. 'Tory' derived from the Irish Toraidhe (bandit, cattle thief, outlaw). Although firmly Anglican, Tories were committed to upholding James’s right to succeed. The Tories called their opponents ‘Whigs’ after the Scottish rebels, though the etymology of the word is obscure. The Whigs were supported by many Dissenters though their leadership was Anglican and aristocratic. As well as backing exclusion, they were also prepared to grant a greater religious toleration to Dissenters (though not to Catholics).

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury
leader of the Whigs
Public domain

The driving force behind the Whigs was the earl of Shaftesbury. In spite of the character-assassination of John Dryden’s famous poem Absalom and Achitophel, he had certain fixed principles: toleration for Protestant Dissenters, though not for Catholics; government by the king in parliament not by the king alone or by the masses. He was an aristocratic ‘republican’ rather than a democrat and believed that a strong aristocracy was one of the best safeguards against arbitrary power. In support of these principles he was prepared to patronize charlatans like Oates and Tonge and he encouraged other people to believe in them. He even tried (June 1680) to get the Middlesex grand jury to present James as a recusant and the Duchess of Portsmouth as a prostitute and a popish agent. The attempt failed because of intervention by Lord Chief Justice Scroggs, but it was a blatant insult to the Crown and caused something of a backlash.

Historians are not agreed about how far the Whigs should be seen as a party. They had many divisions, but nevertheless in the general elections of August-September 1679 and 1681 Shaftesbury and his supporters developed a political organization that became increasingly sophisticated and effective. They used the press to disseminate pamphlet literature and in London and the provinces they set up political dining clubs (like the London Green Ribbon Club) to set up and distribute Whig propaganda. Over the three-year period of the Exclusion Crisis, between five and ten million printed pamphlets were generated. In the election of 1681 many MPs were presented apparently spontaneous instructions, with remarkably similar wording, purporting to be from their constituents and insisting that they grant no parliamentary supply unless the king conceded exclusion and guaranteed frequent parliaments.

During the long prorogation of parliament from May 1679 to October 1680 anti-Catholic hysteria dwindled but the Whigs initiated a sustained campaign of bombarding the king with petitions for the early recall of parliament. Printed petition forms were distributed in London and the counties, and Whig supporters collected signatures, showing that though they were not democrats, they were prepared to use the common people for propaganda purposes. They also organized mass pope-burning demonstrations on 5 and 17 November 1679 and 1680. As a tactic, the petitioning worked both ways. Shaftesbury’s campaign kept alive the fears of popery and arbitrary government, but at the same time resurrected fears of a populist assault on the monarchy: ‘’41 is come again’.

The role of Monmouth

In this fevered atmosphere, Monmouth was the focus of great attention. The rumour abounded of a 'black box' that contained the secret marriage contract of the king and his mother, Lucy Walter. On three separate occasions - in January and March 1679 and June 1680 - Charles felt obliged to counter this story by  issuing public proclamations that he had never married Lucy Walter. However, in the latter half of 1680, with the rumours still rife, the duke toured the western counties and a Whig publisher produced an account of how he had performed a healing by the royal touch. The Tories now saw Monmouth as the disloyal son.

The Second Exclusion Parliament, October 1680-January 1681

After its long prorogation, Parliament was summoned for October 1680. On 11 November the Whig-dominated Commons passed an Exclusion Bill, in spite of arguments that exclusion was against natural justice and prudence, and that James would still be king of Scotland and Ireland. The bill was sent up to the Lords, where Charles attended many of the debates in person. As a tactic this worked. Either because they were intimidated by the king or because they were opposed in principle to altering the succession, the Lords refused (63-30) to give the bill a first reading. Two days after this rejection, the annual 17 November pope-burning, attended by about 100,000 people passed off peacefully. In December the Catholic peer, Lord Stafford, was executed for his alleged part in the Popish Plot. But when Charles prorogued parliament in early January 1681, members dispersed quietly. Hopes that angry Londoners would take to the streets (as in 1641) proved unfounded. Was the tide beginning to turn for the king?

The Whigs' problems

For all their control of the Commons, the Whigs faced some fundamental problems they were never able to overcome and which the Tories could obviously exploit:

1. The lack of a clear candidate for the throne if James were excluded. Both the obvious candidates had drawbacks. The king's son, Monmouth,  was illegitimate, James's daughter, Mary, was married to a foreigner who it was feared (wrongly) would be too dependent on his Stuart uncles and (rightly) would drag England into a long continental war against France.
2. The principle of exclusion was repellent to many who feared that it would mount a challenge to the right to inherit property and the principle of primogeniture.
3. Shaftesbury’s whole campaign was based on a fallacy - that Charles wanted to exclude James and was only looking for an excuse to do so. In fact, they were attacking the king in the one area in which he held extremely strong convictions. As Charles saw it, an attack on James was an attack on the Crown. He was prepared to fight hard and to fight dirty to retain the legitimate succession.

The Third Exclusion Parliament, March 1681

Charles outmanoeuvred his enemies by dissolving the second Exclusion Parliament on 18 January, 1681, and summoning the third to meet on 21 March in the royalist (Tory) stronghold of Oxford. 

In the general election of March 1681 Whig party organization reached a peak of effectiveness, backed by an extremely expensive and extensive propaganda campaign. The Whigs retained their hold both on the electorate and the popular masses and achieved a series of unopposed returns and runaway victories. The newly elected MPs assembled at Oxford with distinguishing ribbons in their hats and great trains of armed men. They were given centrally drafted instructions by the party leaders that they were to insist on exclusion when Parliament met.

In fact the Oxford parliament was a trap contrived by Charles himself. The switch to Oxford was a sign of confidence - he could afford to leave London because, unlike his father, he had not lost control of the trained bands. Nearly 700 troops were drafted into the Oxford. On 22 March he concluded another secret treaty (a verbal not a written agreement) with Louis XIV for a further subsidy. This subsidy was not enough to make him financially independent but combined with the increase in customs revenue it meant that he could now subsist without having to summon parliament. The treaty also meant that Charles was forced to allow Louis a free hand and that he had, in effect, withdrawn from Europe.

At the opening of the Oxford parliament Charles appeared to compromise and said that he was prepared to consider expedients other than exclusion (such as offering a regency: Mary and William were to take charge of government during James’s lifetime). This had the advantage of not taking any powers away from the monarch (something William would never have agreed to). It also wrong-footed the Whigs, who would not accept any alternative to exclusion. The Commons immediately got to work on a new exclusion bill while in the Lords Shaftesbury proposed that Monmouth be named as Charles’s successor. Their intransigence suited the king perfectly. He responded that he would rather die than abandon the prerogative or alter the true succession.

On 24 March the Whigs voted for the new bill. On 28 March Charles came to the Lords in his ordinary clothes. Then he slipped into his robes and dissolved parliament (without going through the preliminary stage of prorogation). In his speech he made no promise to call another parliament. He left Oxford immediately and they had no alternative but to do the same. They were powerless to prevent this or to force the king to call new elections. They had brought armed men with them to Oxford, but never used them. This showed their final and fatal weakness: they were no more willing than the Tories to plunge the nation into another bout of civil war.

On 8 April Charles caused a statement, Declaration Touching the Reasons that Moved Him to Dissolve the Two Last Parliaments to be read from all pulpits. In it he compared the Whigs to those who had started the Civil War; he also promised to rule according to the law and to summon parliaments frequently (through shrewd observers might have noticed that there was no mechanism to force him to do so). With encouragement from the clergy, addresses poured in to the king thanking him for his declaration. A popular Toryism developed which copied the Whigs’ organisational tactics and printed its own newspapers.

Conclusion

1. Charles II survived the Exclusion crisis - either because he showed great political skill or because his position was stronger than most people realised. He had more money and he retained the nucleus of the standing army that had been created in 1678.
2. In retrospect the fear that the country was on the brink of another civil war proved exaggerated. The retreat of the Whigs after the Oxford parliament proved that they had no stomach for a rebellion.
3. With the Whigs defeated Charles was able to turn to the Tories and to take revenge on his enemies.