Whig members when they rode into Oxford had driven into men's heads the belief that they intended to gain their ends by civil war, and, much as the nation disliked the idea of having a 'Popish king, it disliked the idea of civil war still more, and rallied round the king. 1. Tory Reaction. Feb. 6, 1685 1681.-The Tory reaction which followed made itself especially felt in the law-courts. Judges and juries who had combined to send to death innocent Catholics, upon the testimony of forsworn informers, now combined to send to death ardent Whigs, upon the testimony of informers equally base. College, the inventor of the Protestant flail (see p. 615), was condemned to death, as having borne arms in Oxford during the last Parliament, and others shared his fate on equally slight grounds. In the City of London, however, it was still impossible to secure a verdict against a Whig. Juries were everywhere nominated by the sheriff of the county, and sheriffs were, in political cases, ready to compose a jury of political partisans. In every part of England except Middlesex, the sheriffs were named by the king, and were, therefore, Tories. The City of London, which was strongly Whig, had the privilege of electing sheriffs for London and Middlesex, and these sheriffs took care that Middlesex juries should be composed of Whigs. Shaftesbury was accused of high treason, but before he could be tried the Grand Jury of Middlesex had to find a true bill against him that is to say, to declare that there was sufficient evidence against him to call for a trial. On November 24, 1681, the Grand Jury, composed of his own political partisans, threw out the bill, and he was at once set at liberty. 1681-1682 TORY ASCENDENCY 623 2. 'Absolom and Achitophel.' .1681.-A few days before Shaftesbury's release, Dryden, the greatest living master of the heroic couplet, strove to stir up men's minds against the prisoner by his satire of 'Absolom and Achitophel,' in which the part of the tempter Achitophel was assigned to Shaftesbury and the part of the tempted Absolom to Monmouth. Shaftesbury was described as For close designs and crooked councils fit; Pleased with the danger when the waves ran high, 3. The Scottish Test Act and the Duke of York's Return. 1681-1682.-The 'daring pilot's' course was nearly run. Before long, on May 27, 1682, Shaftesbury's most conspicuous enemy, the Duke of York, returned from Scotland. Whilst he was in Scotland he had obtained an Act from the Scottish Parliament, binding on all officials a new test, requiring them to swear to the doctrine of hereditary right and to the maintenance of the episcopal Church. The Earl of Argyle, the son of the Marquis of Argyle, the political leader of the Covenanters against Charles I., having inherited his father's Presbyterianism, not only refused the oath, but gave reasons for refusing. The Crown lawyers declared that his reasons poisoned the minds of the subjects against the king, and he was tried and condemned to death under an old statute against leasing-makingliterally, the making of lies--which had been passed about a century before to punish court favourites who sowed dissension between the king and his people by poisoning the mind of the king against his subjects. Argyle, however, escaped to Holland, and on April 20, 1682, James reached London. 4. The City Elections. 1682.-The first thing on which, after James's return, the king's ministers set their heart, was to strike a blow at Shaftesbury. As he lived in his house in Aldersgate Street and took care never to leave the City, it was impossible to bring him to trial as long as the sheriffs of London and Middlesex were Whigs. The Lord Mayor, Moore, was gained by the Court, and, by various unscrupulous contrivances, he secured the appointment of two Tory sheriffs, and, even before the end of 1682, of a Tory Lord Mayor named Prichard as his own successor. There would no longer be any difficulty in filling the Middlesex jury box with Tories. 5. Flight and Death of Shaftesbury. 1682-1683.-Shaftesbury had for some time been keenly alive to the danger impending over him. He had wild followers in the City ready to follow him in acts of violence, and he had proposed to Russell and Monmouth that the king's guards at Whitehall should be attacked, and the king compelled to do his bidding. Russell and Monmouth recoiled from an act of violence which would certainly end in bloodshed. Shaftesbury still hoped to effect his end by the aid of his less scrupulous supporters; but time slipped away, and on October 19, three days before Prichard's election, he fled to Holland, where he died on January 22, 1683. With all his faults, he had led the way on that path in which the English nation was, before long, to walk, as he had latterly striven for a combination of Parliamentary supremacy with toleration for dissenters and without toleration for Catholics. His personal failure was due to the disquietude caused by his turbulence in the minds of that large part of the community which regards orderly government as a matter of primary necessity. 6. The Attack on the City. 1682—1683.--The difficulty which Charles had experienced in bending the city to his will made him anxious to provide against similar resistance in the future. Taking care to effect his objects under, at least, the form of law, he enforced on the electors in the City, who were called in December to choose the Common Council, the oath of supremacy and the proof required by the Corporation Act of having received the Sacrament in the Church. The result was that a Tory majority was returned on the Common Council. Following up this blow in 1683, he called on the City to show cause, by a writ known as 'Quo Warranto,' before the King's Bench, why its charter should not be forfeited, in consequence of its having imposed irregular tolls and having attacked the king's authority in a petition exhibited in 1680. The King's Bench decided against the City, and the king then offered to restore the charter on certain conditions, of which the principal was, that he was to have a veto on the election of its principal officers. At first the City accepted his terms, but, before the end of the year, it drew back, and the king then named the Lord Mayor and other officers directly, paying no further regard to the municipal self-government under which the City had, for many centuries, conducted its own affairs. 7. The Remodelling of the Corporations. 1683–1684. A 1683-1684 THE FALL OF THE WHIGS 625 large number of other corporate towns were treated as London had been treated. By a plentiful use of writs of Quo Warranto, the judges on circuit obtained the surrender of their charters, after which the king issued new ones in which Tories alone were named as members of the corporations. It was said of Jeffreys, one amongst the judges who was most subservient, that he made all charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down before him.' The object of these proceedings was to make sure of a Tory Parliament when the time came for fresh elections. In a large number of boroughs the corporations chose the members, and in such cases wherever the corporation had been remodelled, there would be a safe Tory seat. At the same time the laws against the Dissenters were strictly executed, and the prisons filled with their ministers. 8. The Rye House Plot. 1683. When injustice is done under legal forms, there are usually some persons who think it allowable to appeal to force. Some of Shaftesbury's more violent followers formed a plot to attack the king and his brother at the Rye House on their return from Newmarket, and either to seize or murder them. The plot failed, as Charles passed the Rye House some days earlier than was expected, and several of the conspirators were taken and executed. 9. The Whig Combination. 1683.-The discovery of the Rye House Plot brought to light a dangerous combination amongst the Parliamentary Whigs, in which Monmouth, Russell, Essex, Lord Howard of Escrick, and other notable persons were implicated. They had, indeed, kept themselves free from any intention to offer personal violence to the king, but they had attempted to form an association strong enough to compel him to summon another Parliament, though apparently without coming to a definite conclusion as to the way in which they were to use compulsion. In their own eyes their project was no more than constitutional agitation. In the eyes of the king and of the Crown lawyers it was a preparation for rebellion. Essex committed suicide in prison, whilst Howard of Escrick turned informer against his friends. 10. Trial and Execution of Lord Russell. 1683.-Russell was accordingly put on his trial as a traitor. In those days no one on his trial for treason was allowed to be defended by a lawyer, as far as the facts of the case were concerned, but no objection was taken to his having some one near him to take notes of the evidence and to assist his memory. "Your friends," wrote his wife to him shortly before the trial, "believing I can do you some service at your trial, I am extremely willing to try. My resolution will hold out, pray let yours." Her offer was accepted, and she gave her husband all the help that it was possible to give. The jury, however, brought in a verdict of guilty, and sentence of death followed. In prison Russell was visited by two ministers, Tillotson and Burnet. No clergymen in England were more liberal-minded than these two, yet they urged the prisoner to acknowledge that resistance to the king was in all cases unlawful. Russell maintained that, in extreme cases, subjects might resist. Here lay the root of the political animosity between Whig and Tory. Whether an extreme case had occurred was a matter of opinion. "As for the share I had in the prosecution of the Popish Plot," Russell declared on the scaffold, "I take God to witness that I proceeded in it in the sincerity of my heart, being then really convinced, as I am still, that there was a conspiracy against the king, the nation, and the Protestant religion." It was because the nation at large no longer held this to be true that the Tories were in power. 11. Execution of Algernon Sidney. 1683.—Russell's trial was followed by that of Algernon Sidney. Though the real charge against him was that of having conspired against the king, only one, and that a not very credible, witness could be produced as evidence of this; and the prosecuting lawyers then brought forward a treatise, written in his own hand, but neither printed nor circulated in manuscript, in which he had advocated the right of subjects to depose their king. This was held to be equivalent to having a second witness against him, and Sidney was condemned and executed. He was a theoretical Republican, and it was hard to bring up against him a writing which he had never published. Other less important Whigs were also put to death. Monmouth owed his pardon to his father's tenderness, but, as he still continued to bear himself as the head of a party, he was sent into honourable exile in Holland. 12. Parties at Court. 1684. In the spring of 1684 three years had passed without a Parliament, although the statute repealing the Triennial Act (see p. 588) had declared that Parliament ought to be summoned every three years. So sure was Charles of his ground that he liberated Danby without causing a murmur of complaint. At Court there were two parties, one led by Halifax, which urged that, by summoning a Parliament now, Charles would not only comply with the law, but would have a Parliament as loyal as the Cavalier Parliament had been; the other, led by Lawrence Hyde, the second son of Clarendon, |