King James II: Playbook for tyranny

G.M. Trevelyan’s, ‘The English Revolution 1688-1689’, shows the Playbook of a budding tyrant, the Roman Catholic King James II. Trevelyan explains how it was possible for James to turn England into a Roman Catholic country under an Absolute Monarch, in the style of Louis XIV of France, his ally and friend. This is part of the importance of his book.  There is more to be said but below I set out the main ways James sought to be a despot and tyrant.

The first thing James did when he became king in 1685 was to summon Parliament for the House of Commons to vote him revenues for life, to enable him to carry on the government and carry through his plan to make England Roman Catholic again, without hopefully needing to ask for any more money. He believed the Parliament would give him more if he did ask. 

His plan was:

1. To repeal the Test Act and the Habeas Corpus Act and other laws that hampered his plan.

2. Once Parliament had agreed to this, to proceed without any breach of the law to fill out the Army, the Navy, the Cabinet, and the Civil Service and the best places in the Church with Roman Catholics, side-by-side with High Anglicans.

3. To ban the Church from preaching against "the Kings religion", Roman Catholicism.

4. Puritanism to be extirpated by the continued application of the Clarendon Code against Protestant Dissenters.

5. The evolution of Church and State towards becoming fully Roman Catholic could move peacefully forward.

The High Tory House of Commons, deceived by his promises to support the Church of England, voted him revenues for life. This enabled him to live without Parliament for 3 years.

However, when Parliament saw what James was doing it began to resist him.   

Since Parliament would not alter the laws, James could only attain what he wanted by regarding no law as a restriction on the Royal will. The prerogative of the kings of England, the ancient claim to an undefined residuary power, had sometimes been used in emergencies. James was to use it to ignore the laws he didn't like and even suspend them at his word. He became an absolute monarch.

The next part of his plan which he put into place was as follows:

1. He packed the Bench with his own men, appointing Judges who would do what he told them to do.

2. A collusive action was brought against Sir Edward Hales, a Roman Catholic officer whom the king had by letters patent dispensed from the obligation of qualifying as a Protestant under the terms of the Test Act. In June 1686 a bench of 12 judges declared that Hales could keep his commission without penalty because the king's dispensing power was part of his prerogative. This may very well have been true but the king went on to use that as a rationale for placing Roman Catholics wholesale into every branch of the service, civil and military, until no Protestant felt safe in his office unless he was prepared to convert to Roman Catholicism.

3. James turned this "dispensing" power which within strict limits was legal into a "suspending" power that was utterly illegal and which rendered all laws subservient to the mere will of the king.

Those judges that asked for this to stop were dismissed and replaced by more of James's compliant judges. The packing of the judicial bench was essential to the successful policy of James.

4.  By packing the bench James next obtained a decision on the status of his soldiers that was necessary to his plans. He depended on the Army which he was gradually handing over to Roman Catholic officers and into whose ranks he was beginning to introduce batches of Roman Catholic recruits from Ireland. To control these soldiers James obtained a decision from the judges that desertion was a felony, the penalty for which could be death. The king could therefore keep his army together without summoning Parliament.

5. James proceeded to break one law after another. Prerogative was to be everything, Statutes nothing if they were not to the liking of the king.

6. In 1686 the direct attack on the Church of England was prepared by the revival of the Court of High Commission to govern the church in virtue of the Royal supremacy, with the power of suspending and depriving recalcitrant clergyman. The Court was illegal, as it had been abolished by Statute in the first session of the Long Parliament in 1641. And this had been repeated in 1661. James revived this Court to browbeat and bully bishops, clergyman and dons. The Court immediately proceeded to suspend the Bishop of London for refusing to suspend one of his clergy illegally for defending the doctrine and practices of the Church of England against those of Roman Catholic church.

7. The High Commission was next used in an attack on the Universities which brought to a head the breach between the king and the old Royalist party. By a series of arbitrary acts, supported, when necessary, by the pronouncements of the illegal Court of High Commission James put three great Oxford colleges – Christ Church, university and Magdalen – under Roman Catholic rule. Five fellows of Magdalen had been illegally ejected from their freehold for their refusal to break the law in the matter of the election of their president.

8. Early in 1687 James realized he needed to gain the support of the Nonconformists. He offered them relief from the Clarendon Code. In accordance with this new policy James in April 1687 issued his famous Declaration of Indulgence. He suspended the Clarendon Code, the Test Act of 1673 and all laws injurious either to Roman Catholics or Protestant Dissenters.

9. The power to "suspend" statutes wholesale, claimed by James's Declaration, was very different from the power to "dispense" with the action of a statute in some particular case like that of Hales. The dispensing power had been pronounced legal in proper circumstances; but this larger claim to “dispense with laws”, the ‘suspending power’ as it was distinctively called, subverted all Constitutional restraints upon the king. It had been pronounced illegal both by Charles II and his Parliament. Indeed, if it was legal there was no more law save the Royal will.

10. Believing that the Nonconformists would accept his Declaration of Indulgence and support him, James proceeded to remodel the county magistracy, the corporations that govern the towns and the bodies that elected the members of parliament and filled the vacant positions with Roman Catholics.

11. The efforts of James throughout the greater part of 1687 and 1688 were directed to packing a new House of Commons that would support his policy and repeal the Test Act. The remodelling of the corporations was partly directed to this end; the remodelling of the county magistracy on similar lines was no less essential but proved even more difficult.

12. In 1688 James republished the Declaration of Indulgence but this time he required the clergy of the Church of England to read the Declaration in their churches after the morning service. Most clergymen believed this Declaration to be illegal. Archbishop Sancroft and the majority of his suffragans recommended universal disobedience to the king's order. Sancroft in fact was by nature shy and retiring man and was very strict in his belief as a high churchman that the king's word was the guide for all true subjects and Christians, but he did not hesitate to recommend disobedience. They now declared that the parliament and not the king was the source of law and the king out of parliament could not suspend statutes. The king's reaction was to put Sancroft and six other bishops on trial for seditious libel for so he designated the petition they had presented to him begging that the clergy should not be forced to read the Declaration because it was illegal. They were committed for trial. The trial aroused popular feeling to its height. The bishops were acquitted!

On 30 June 1688 the day of the acquittal of the Seven Bishops a document was secretly dispatched to William of Orange, inviting him to come over to England with a military force, round which the country would rally in rebellion against the government of James. There was no offer of the crown or any indication as to what the ultimate settlement should be. The invitation was signed in cipher by Devonshire, Russell, and Sidney; for the Whigs by Danby and the Bishop of London for the church and Tory party by Shrewsbury and Lumley whose signatures attested the renewed zeal of the nation for Protestantism which both these noblemen had recently become converts.

In my next blog I will draw parallels with what James did and what has been going on in England and the UK.