Reign on James II page 2

On the 23rd of April the coronation took place. It was a strange mixture of the pecuniary meanness, the superstition, and the occasional fits of compliance which marked this king. As to expenditure, he was desirous to follow the ancient form, and go in procession from the Tower to Westminster. Charles had done this on his restoration, to the great delight and edification of the citizens and their wives, as well as to the encouragement of the public. But James, on inquiry, recoiled at the expense, and gave up this only portion of the ceremony which was open to his subjects at large. On the other hand, he expended upwards of one hundred thousand pounds on the dress and jewels of the queen, which could be seen only by a very small fraction of his people. The difficulty of a king and queen, both catholics, being crowned according to protestant rites, presented itself to James, and he consulted the pope and the most eminent theologians on the subject. There was, however, no other mode, and he told Barillon that to attempt anything else would cost him his crown. But if he could not set aside the protestant rites altogether, he resolved to curtail them. By his order Sancroft abridged the ritual, and removed such things as were most objectionable to catholics. The communion service was omitted, so was the usual presentation of a fine, richly-bound Bible, with the exhortation to prize above all earthly things the precious volume. Yet what the king did allow to remain, and did himself participate in, was strange enough in a catholic, lie appeared to join in the chanting of the heretical litany, offered his oblation on the heretical altar, and was anointed by heretical hands.

On the day of the coronation in England, being St. George's day, the parliament in Scotland met. He called on the Scots to set a good example to the approaching parliament of England in a liberal provision for the crown; and the Scottish estates, as if complimented by this appeal, not only responded to it by annexing the excise to the crown for ever, and offering him besides two hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year for his own life, but declared their abhorrence of " all principles derogatory to the king's sacred, supreme, sovereign, and absolute power and authority." They did more, they passed an act making it death for any one to preach in a conventicle, whether under a roof or in the open air. In England the elections were going on most favourably, and therefore James seized on the opportunity, whilst all appeared smiling and secure, to indulge his appetite for a little vengeance.

On the 7th of May, Titus Oates, the enemy of James and of popery, the arch-instrument of the whig agitators, was brought up to the bar of the King's Bench, before the terrible Jeffreys. Death had prevented, in a great measure, the satisfaction of James and the catholics who had been so mercilessly pursued by the wretches who had sworn so freely to popish plots, and caused such torrents of innocent blood to be shed. Dugdale, Bedloe, Carstairs, and others had escaped into the grave; Dugdale, perpetually pursued, in his imagination, by the ghost of lord Stafford and Car- stairs, declaring himself unfit to receive better burial than a dog, But two of the chief miscreants, Oates and Danger- field, remained. Oates was already condemned to pay a fine of one hundred thousand pounds, or remain in prison till paid; but this actual doom of perpetual imprisonment did not satisfy James. When he was now brought up, the court was crowded with people, a large proportion of them being catholics, glad to see the punishment of their ruthless enemy. But if they expected to see him depressed or humbled, in that they were disappointed. He came up bold and impudent as ever. Jeffreys let fly l*is fiercest Billingsgate at him, but Oates returned him word for word unabashed. On his last trial he had sworn he had attended at a Jesuits' consult on the 24th of April, 1678, in London, but it was now proved beyond doubt, that on that very day Oates was at St. Omer. He had sworn also to being present at the commission of treasonable acts by Ireland, the Jesuit, in London, on the 8th and 12th of August, and on the 2nd of September of the same year. It was now also clearly proved that Ireland left London that year on the 2nd of August, and did not return till the 14th of September. Oates was convicted on both indictments, and was sentenced to pay a thousand marks on each indictment; to be stripped of his clerical habit; to be pilloried in Palace Yard and led round Westminster Hall, with an inscription over his head describing his crime. He was again to be pilloried in front of the Royal Exchange, and after that to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and after two days' interval whipped again from Newgate to Tyburn. If he survived this, which was not expected, he was to be confined for life, and five times every year he was to stand again in the pillory as long as he lived.

If the crimes of this wretch were monstrous, his punishment was equally so. He had the assurance on his trial to call many persons of distinction, including members of parliament, to give evidence in his favour, but he was answered only by bitter reproaches, for having led them into the spilling of much innocent blood. The lash was applied the first day so unmercifully, that though he endured it for some time, it compelled him to utter the most horrible yells. Several times he fainted, but the flagellation never ceased, and when the flogging ceased, it was doubted whether he were alive. The most earnest entreaties were made to both the king and queen to have the second flogging omitted, but they were both inexorable. Yet the guilty wretch survived through all, though he was said to receive seventeen hundred stripes the second day on his already lacerated body; and so long as James continued on the throne, he was subjected to the pillory his five times a year, and lived to be pardoned at the revolution, and receive a pension of five pounds a week in lieu of that granted him by Charles II.

Dangerfield, who had not only succeeded in destroying so many innocent victims, but who had displayed a villainy and ingratitude of the blackest dye, was also convicted, and was sentenced to pay five hundred pounds, and to be pilloried twice and whipped twice over the same ground as Oates. He was extremely insolent on his trial, but on hearing his sentence he was struck with horror, flew into the wildest exclamations, declared himself a dead man, and chose a text for his funeral sermon. Singularly enough, his end was really at hand. On returning from his whipping, a gentleman named Robert Francis, of Gray's Inn, stepped up to the coach and asked him how his back was. Dangerfield replied by a curse, and Francis thrusting at him with his cane, wounded him in the eye; the wound was declared to occasion his death, though the unmerciful flogging was probably the real cause, and Francis was tried for the murder and hanged.

The meeting of parliament on the 19th of May drew the public attention from these barbarities. Every means had been exerted to influence the elections. In the counties the reaction of toryism, and the effects of the Rye House plot in defeating and intimidating the whigs, gave the court every advantage. In the corporations the deprivation of their ancient charters made them the slaves of government, But even with these advantages James was not satisfied. Where- ever there appeared likely to be any independent spirit shown, agents were sent down to overawe the people, and to force a choice of the government candidate. Even Jeffreys, the blustering lord chief justice, was despatched into Buckinghamshire, to intimidate the countymen of Hampden, but they showed their ancient spirit and threw out the government man. To other places copies of the exclusion bill and black boxes resembling those said to contain the evidence of the marriage of Charles II. and Lucy Walters, were sent and burnt before the people. Everywhere the lords-lieutenants of counties and the returning officers were vehement in support of government, and in consequence, when parliament assembled, the great whig opposition which had predominated in the last three parliaments, now presented a mere remnant. A host of new men showed themselves on the benches, only a hundred -and fifty out of the full number, six hundred and thirty-five members, having sate before. The management of these raw representatives was intrusted by James to two thorough government creatures- - the lord Middleton, who had cut so dismal a figure in the Scottish prosecutions with Lauderdale, and Graham, lord Preston, who had long been the ambassador at Paris, and well drilled into the practice of corruption through the secret bribery of Louis. In the first business, the election of a speaker, the court appeared divided against itself. The lord chancellor Guildford recommended Sir Thomas Mears, a trimmer, like himself, but Jeffreys, who never omitted an opportunity of mortifying Guildford, proposed Sir John Trevor, a pettifogging tool of his own, and he was chosen.

On the 22nd of May James went to the house of lords in great state to open parliament. He took his seat on the throne with the crown on his head, and his queen, and Anne, his daughter, princess of Denmark, standing on the right hand of the throne. The Spanish and other catholic ambassadors were present, and heard the pope, the mass, the worship of the Virgin Mary, and the saints all renounced, as the lords took their oaths. James then produced a written speech and read it. He repeated in it what he had before declared to the council, that he would maintain the constitution and the church as by law established, and added that, "Having given this assurance concerning their religion and property, they might rely on his word." Although it had been the custom to listen to the royal speech in respectful silence, at this declaration the members of both houses broke into loud acclamations. He then informed them that he expected a revenue for life, such as they had voted his late brother. Again the expression of accord was loud and satisfactory, but what followed was not so palatable. "The inclination men have for frequent parliaments, some may think, would be the best secured by feeding me from time to time by such proportions as they shall think convenient, and this argument, it being the first time I speak to you from the throne, I will answer once for all, that this would be a very improper method to take with me; and that the best way to engage me to meet you often is always to use me well. I expect, therefore, that you will comply with me in what I have desired, and that you will do it speedily." This agreeable assurance he followed up by announcing a rebellion to have broken out in Scotland under Argyll and other refugees from Holland.

When the commons returned to their own house, lord Preston entered into a high eulogium of the king, telling the house that his name spread terror over all Europe, and that the reputation of England was already beginning to rise under his rule; they had only to have full confidence in him as a prince who had never broken his word, and thus enable him to assert the dignity of England. The house went into a committee of supply, and voted his majesty the same revenue that Charles had enjoyed, namely, one million two hundred thousand pounds a year for life. But when several petitions against some of the late elections were presented, a serious opposition presented itself in a most unexpected quarter. This was from Sir Edward Seymour, of Berry Pomeroy Castle, the member for Exeter. Seymour was both a tory and a high churchman, proud of his descent fröm the lord protector Seymour, and who had great influence in the western counties. He was a man of an indifferent moral character, but able and accomplished, and a forcible debater. He was now irritated by the government proceedings in the elections which had interfered with his interests, and he made a fierce attack on the late government pressure on the elections; denounced the removal of the charters, the conduct of the returning officers; declared that there was a design to repeal the test and habeas corpus acts, and moved that no one should vote whose right to sit was disputed, till that right had been ascertained by a searching inquiry. There was no seconder to the motion, and it fell to the ground; for the whole house, including the whigs, sate, as it were, thunderstruck. But the effect was deep and lasting, and in time did not fail of its end.

For the present, however, things went smoothly enough, and the king informed the house, through Sir Dudley North, the brother of the lord-keeper Guildford, and the same who had been elected sheriff of London by the influence of the late king for his ready and ingenious modes of serving the royal will, that his late brother had left considerable debts, and that the naval and ordnance stores were getting low. The house promptly agreed to lay on new taxes, and North induced them to tax sugar and tobacco, so that the king now had a revenue of one million nine hundred thousand pounds from England, besides his pension from France, and was strong in revenue.

The lords were employed in doing an act of justice, in calling before them the lord Danby, and rescinding the impeachment still hanging over his head, and also summoning to their bar the lords Powis, Arundel, and Bellasis, the victims of the alleged popish plot, and fully discharging them as well as the earl of Tyrone. They also passed a bill reversing the attainder of lord Stafford, who had been executed for treason and concern in the popish plot, now admitting that he had been unjustly sacrificed, through the perjury of Oates. The commons were proceeding to the third reading of this bill, when the rebellion of Monmouth was announced, and the question remained unsettled till the trial of Warren Hastings, more than a century afterwards, when men of all parties declared the Oates' popish plot a pure fiction, and the attainder of Stafford was then formally reversed.

The political refugees who had fled to Holland and sought protection from prince William, were numerous, and some of them of considerable distinction. Monmouth and the earl of Argyll were severally looked up to as the heads of the English and Scottish exiles. The furious persecution against the covenanters in Scotland and the whigs in England, had not only swelled these bands of refugees, but rendered them at once ardent for revenge and restoration. Amongst them Ford, lord Grey of Wark, Ferguson, who had been conspicuous amongst the whig plotters, Wildman and Danvers, of the same party, Ayloffe and Wade, whig lawyers and plotters, Goodenough, formerly sheriff of London, and whom we have seen giving evidence against the papists, Rumbold, the Rye House maltster, and others, were incessantly endeavouring to excite Monmouth to avail himself of his popularity, and the hatred of popery which existed, against his uncle, and strike for the crown. Monmouth, however, for some time betrayed no desire for so hazardous an undertaking. On the death of Charles he had returned from the Hague to avoid giving cause of jealousy to James, and led the life of an English gentleman at Brussels. William of Orange strongly advised him to take a command in the war of Austria against the Turks, where he might win honour and a rank worthy of his birth; but Monmouth would not listen to it. He had left his wife, the great heiress of Buccleuch, to whom he had been married almost as a boy from royal policy, and had attached himself to lady Henrietta Wentworth, baroness Wentworth of Nettlestede. The attachment, though illicit, appeared to be mutual and ardent. Monmouth confessed that lady Henrietta, who was beautiful, amiable, and accomplished, had weaned him from a vicious life, and had their connection been lawful, nothing could have been more fortunate for Monmouth. In her society he seemed to have grown indifferent to ambition and the life of courts. But he was beset by both Grey and Ferguson, and, unfortunately for him, they won over lady Wentworth to their views. She encouraged Monmouth, and offered him her income and her jewels to furnish him with immediate funds. With such an advocate, Grey and Ford at length succeeded. Grey was a man of blemished character. He had seduced and run off with his wife's sister, a daughter of the earl of Berkeley, and was a poor and desperate adventurer, notoriously cowardly on the field of battle. Ferguson was a fiery demagogue and zealot of insurrection. He had been a preacher and schoolmaster amongst the dissenters, then a clergyman of the church, and finally had become a most untiring intriguer, and was deep in the Rye House plot. Under all this fire of rebellion, however, there was more than a suspected foul smoke of espionage. He was shrewdly believed, though not by his dupes, to be in the pay of government, and employed to betray and urge on its enemies to ruin.