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Consentir à la Restauration: signes, récits, performances

The End of the Restoration Consensus: Staging Consent and its Limits during the Exclusion Crisis

Emmanuel Lemée

Résumés

L’attitude ambiguë du roi Charles II durant la Crise de l’Exclusion est souvent interprétée à première vue comme une marque de faiblesse et de désintérêt du souverain pour les affaires politiques. Cet article argumente que cette attitude reflète en réalité la manière dont il régnait sur l’Angleterre depuis sa restauration en 1660, utilisant son image de monarque hédoniste et bienveillant afin de cimenter autour de lui le consensus politique nécessaire à l’acceptation de son règne. La Crise de l’Exclusion constitue à la fois le pinacle de ce mode de gouvernement, la manière de mettre en scène le consentement factice du souverain aux volontés du Parlement permettant à la Couronne de traverser la crise sans grand dommage, mais également son baroud d’honneur. Décrédibilisée par un usage trop visible et intense, cette méthode devenue inefficace fut ainsi remplacée par un style de gouvernement autoritaire, pavant la voie à une évolution des relations entre souverain et Parlement.

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  • 1 This tale was at the heart of Charles II’s royal propaganda from his exile to his death. When he ma (...)

1King Charles II was, if anything, a great storyteller. He never missed an opportunity to delight his audience with tales from his own private and public life, and there was not a soul at court who had not heard him tell the tale of how he managed, as a young man, to escape the Roundheads after the battle of Worcester by hiding inside the trunk of an old oak (Ollard).1 Much of the king’s time and energy was devoted to this tale-telling activity, as he endeavoured to give his audience, both in the British Isles and abroad, an image of himself as king that would make him appear a pleasant and likeable fellow. Indeed, his main concern during his reign was, first and foremost, to sell the monarchy to a very distrusting audience: while the English people, and the gentry first among them, welcomed the Restoration with open arms in the aftermath of Cromwell’s death, they did not forget Charles I’s dabbling in authoritarian government. While they feared a new period of civil unrest, they also feared a possible return to absolutist tendencies, and it was that fear Charles II tried to appease at every turn. This was made even more difficult by the fact that he did, in truth, walk in the footsteps of his father, with whom he shared the vision of a powerful Crown, with the financial and military means to intervene in Europe and the broader world.

  • 2 The court and courtiers were willing participants in this endeavour. One of the most famous example (...)

2To achieve this, Charles II had to tell the tale of an innocuous and pleasant king, one who was everything his father had not been. The Merry Monarch” image, which was the antithesis to the Leviathan of the preceding decades, was part of that tale, and Charles went to great lengths to broadcast it. His court, infamous throughout Europe for its debauchery, was the stage he used to do so.2 Political consent was another, major part of this tale. It was crucial that Charles appeared reasonable and open to the English people’s needs: after all, as Tim Harris puts it “the Restoration happened because people wanted it to” (2006, 44). This meant the king knew he had to display a good working relationship with Parliament, an institution which had come to be seen as the voice of the English people. Parliament’s political agenda revolved around keeping taxes low and safeguarding individual liberties against an authoritarian Crown, fostering the interests of a quickly rising gentry (Heal and Holmes 190-242). The king’s political agenda, however, revolved around making the Crown stronger to cement the Restoration, which meant raising the Crown’s revenue and furthering its control over press, corporations, local officers and judges, every office or institution capable of countering the king’s power. Balancing both proved a formidable challenge, one that could not be achieved without a good deal of deception, or at least clever communication. Therefore, Charles II often affected the appearance of consent, deceiving Parliament into believing the king was willing to follow its suggestions only to renege at the last minute.

3This contribution analyses, through the case of the Exclusion Crisis, how staging the king’s consent to the nation’s will was at the core of Charles II’s style of government during the major part of his reign. It will focus mainly on the central and most visible question of the Crisis, the exclusion from the line of succession to the Crown of the king’s Catholic brother, James, duke of York. While recent studies have shown that an Exclusion Bill was not the real political problem at the heart of the crisis (Knights 1994), it was however used by both king and Parliament as their main political platform and was at the heart of their political communication. It seems it was never really Charles II’s intention to exclude his brother from the politics of the three kingdoms, especially as he relied heavily on him to govern efficiently. This however did not prevent Charles from showing numerous signs he was open to some sort of de facto exclusion. While this has very often been seen as a token of the king’s lack of political backbone, I will argue that it was, in fact, simply how the Crown had managed public relations since the Restoration. This appearance of consent, therefore, aimed not to deceive Parliament and the emerging public sphere, but to foster the illusion of a political consensus that was needed for the Restoration Settlement to endure and the gears of England’s politics to work.

4First, I will explain why the king was compelled to consent publicly to parts of the Whigs’ political agenda during the Exclusion Crisis, both because of a difficult conjuncture and because of the political philosophy inherited from the Civil Wars and Cromwellian era. I will then show how this consent was staged by the king and his entourage to appear genuine even when it remained minimal, maintaining, through a fiction shared and accepted by members of Parliament, the delicate balance between king and Parliament. Lastly, putting this staged consent in a broader perspective, I will show that this episode marked both the culmination and the end of a style of government which had spanned the major part of Charles II’s reign. While this clever staging of consent helped the Crown weather the political crisis, it made the king’s habit of faking public consent so blatant it became ineffective for future uses. This played a major role in shaping the king’s policy in the last years of his reign, ushering in a new, authoritarian, style of government. Thus, it can be argued that Charles II’s personal rule – the period when he “at last emerged as an unfettered sovereign” (Jones 162), namely the years 1681-1685 – was not so much an unexpected turnaround as it was the king dispensing with the benevolent façade he had relied upon to rule until then.

A king compelled to consent

  • 3 Forged by two adventurers following the assassination of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in 1678, the Popi (...)

5Whatever his plans had been, the king was compelled to consent to several sacrifices during the first years of the Exclusion Crisis. The Crisis happened because the Crown was weakened following the revelation of the Popish Plot in 16783 and the ensuing series of events (Harris 2006, 190). Faced with sudden, violent and popular opposition (Harris 1990), the king and his advisors simply had no other choice, at first, than to go along with the Whigs’ demands. Since they could not openly and simply refuse to discuss the exclusion of the duke of York from the succession without risking a new revolution, consenting to the debate seemed the smarter choice. By appearing concerned with the matter, the king was not only upholding his role as protector of the Church and the realm, but he also avoided appearing to submit to his Parliament: if Exclusion was to happen, it needed to stem from a common decision so that the king could save face. As Charles II put it himself, it was crucial he “[should] not follow [Parliament’s] zeal, but lead it” (House of Commons, Journals 607).

6Two key factors explained why the king could not, even if he wanted to, dispense with an apparent consent to exclusion. First, because the Popish Plot and its immediate aftermath brought about the collapse of government and, perhaps more importantly, of the machinery painstakingly built during the 1670s to ensure the king’s control over Parliament (Harris 2006, 61-62). While many of the king’s closest advisors were lost to the Plot, the worst blow the king had to suffer was the incarceration of the Lord High Treasurer Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. While the support of the Lords was largely ensured, as most of them were staunch royalists, it was through Danby’s bribes and huge clientele that the Commons were steered towards the Crown’s interests (Knights 2008).

7The second factor was that the Crown, from 1678 to 1680, was not in control of the political narrative. The Whig opposition managed to harness the widespread discontent that had slowly built throughout the three kingdoms since the Restoration and to present its political agenda as the key matters that needed to be resolved to put an end to the crisis (Harris 2006, 139-146). This meant the king had lost the political initiative, for the first time since the Restoration.

8Beyond the pragmatical decision of the king, in this difficult situation, to act cautiously and play his cards close to his chest, there was another reason for him to consent publicly to at least some of the exclusionists’ demands. Mutual consent, king and people each conceding a bit to find common ground, was the clearest way to achieve political consensus, and political consensus was the foundation upon which the Restoration was built. For the Settlement to endure, king and people had to show they were willing to keep working together. In this spirit, there had seemed to be no need, in 1660, to put in place clear boundaries to the restored king’s power, while at the same time the Declaration of Breda did not need to be a detailed political program. What mattered was the assurance, expressed in the last paragraph of the Declaration, that Charles Stuart was “ready to consent to any Act or Acts of Parliament to the Purposes aforesaid” (House of Lords, Journals 11 7).

9This mutual consent was kept alive in the way both king and Parliament managed their interactions during the next twenty years. It was sought as a permanent confirmation that the Restoration Settlement was still being observed. However, as the renewed power of the Crown became more and more apparent throughout the years – and Charles II was almost certainly the most powerful king the Stuart dynasty had ever produced – the need to prove that this power was not misused became in turn more and more dire. Charles II’s subjects were not cautious of absolute rule per se. What people were afraid of was arbitrary rule, power that was both unchecked and used in the sole interest of the sovereign, at the expense of the people, like what the English people saw in Louis XIV’s France (Miller 188-190). Consent to the people’s will, from the king’s part, therefore played a major role in reaffirming day after day that Charles II was not a tyrant. This was sorely needed, as the king’s policy was scrutinised to look for signs, as one account puts it, he was going “to reintroduce into those kingdoms the catholick religion, and reasume by degrees absolute power” (Bodleian Library, Carte MSS 198).

  • 4 The only thing to which Parliament was asked to consent was taxation. Without this consent, raising (...)

10Balance between the king and the people was therefore at the heart of the political machinery of the Restoration. While the king could very well overpower Parliament and rule as he saw fit, it was clear in Charles II’s mind it was not in his best interest to do so, as this was the slippery slope which had led to his father’s demise. Everything, therefore, had to be bargained with Parliament. For example, to try and save Danby from a trial that could only lead to his death, Charles gave his assent, in January 1679, to a bill for the disbanding of the army (Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, CP Angleterre 133). This was not so much the result of clear negotiations than a way for the king to offer quid pro quo to Parliament: if the House of Commons got something they wanted, it was only fair they gave the king something he wanted in return. This had worked well up until the Exclusion Crisis, both the king and Parliament asking each other for repeated gestures of goodwill. Parliament often asked for the king’s “assent”, as it did for example in March 1678, on the eve of the Plot’s discovery, when asking the king to go to war against France in exchange for the promise of money (House of Commons, Journals 454-455). To this, the king gave his “consent” (House of Commons, Journals 480-482), indicating he was ready to accept whatever Parliament wanted, provided it was reasonable. This political terminology, and the associated positions of power, were fixed. Never did the Commons “consent” to the king’s will:4 it was their role to make propositions and the king’s to consent to them. This was explained by the fact the people, whom the Commons represented, had from their part originally consented to bestow upon the king his political authority by restoring him (Goldie 15-18). This was, of course, a fiction, but a performative one: while it lasted, it showed, by reenacting the Restoration Settlement, that political consensus could still be achieved.

How to get away with refusal

11This fragile balance became, however, more and more difficult to maintain as time went by and public support for the restored monarch waned. The Exclusion Crisis marked the culmination of these difficulties because, for the first time since 1660, the people, and particularly those who recognized themselves as Whigs, did not settle for performative gestures and speeches. The matter was simply too grave, and the distrust of the king too high, to give Charles the benefit of the doubt. The Crisis, therefore, presented the king with a dilemma. Careful staging of his consent was necessary to resolve it safely, and this is what he set himself to do, long before the Tory propaganda took off and gave him the public support he needed to bring the Crisis to an end. For this consent to appear genuine and work, the king had to both make real gestures, however small, to show his resolve and to create a political narrative that would support, in people’s minds, the idea he would, in the end, consent to what was needed of him.

12While the king had to make sacrifices to make his consent believable, these were, in the end, limited. The disbanding of the army raised for war against France was inevitable and Charles only tried to delay it to better preserve parts of these new regiments by sending them to Ireland, Tangiers, France or the Caribbean. Of the five Catholic Lords who were imprisoned in the Tower of London following the Popish Plot, only two were tried and only one of them, William Howard, was found guilty of treason and executed. It did not help that Howard’s defence was, as was noted by many contemporaries including diarist John Evelyn (Diary 423-426), very confused and that seven out of eight members of his family who were peers voted him guilty, due to long-standing and bitter familial grudges. On the crucial matter of Exclusion itself, Charles always stood his ground and never formally agreed to any form of exclusion of his brother from the succession.

13Therefore, if one were to look back, at the end of Charles II’s reign, on the years 1678-81, one would probably think this all had been much ado about nothing. In the heat of things, however, each of these limited and controlled sacrifices, such as the duke of York’s exile from England, had carried a significant risk for the Crown. In the beginning of 1679, it was quickly decided by the king and his advisors that the king’s brother, who was the heart of the political storm raging through the capital, had to go (Levillain 670-672). While these two years of exile turned out to be a somewhat benign experience for the duke and even helped him build his clientele and strengthen his position at court, it was both a real sacrifice and a real risk for the king. It was a sacrifice because the king’s brother played a crucial role in governing the British Isles, Charles using him as a proxy in numerous diplomatic and military matters that were at the heart of his politics: by sending him away, the king lost, for example, his main contact with Spain and France, which were his best hopes of getting the money he desperately needed if Parliament refused to support him (Lemée 283-286).

14It was also a risk, because the king could not be assured his brother would be able to return. In fact, not only did the duke of York almost lose his life when his ship, the Gloucester, foundered while returning from Scotland, but many at court tried to use this opportunity to make sure he stayed away for good. Some close advisors to the king, such as his brother himself or even George Savile, marquess of Halifax, even tried to dissuade him to consent to this exile, arguing that it opened a very dangerous precedent that could very well lead the way back to a republic (Savile 2).

15The wager was, however, a controlled one. Brussels was one of the most important strategic locations and a main diplomatic hub of Northwestern Europe (Levillain 665-666), while the duke’s exile in Scotland allowed the Stuart crown to reconnect with its Scottish roots and use the ironclad dynastic legitimacy the family enjoyed in their Northern realm to balance the opposition in England (Mann 142-169). The spectacular welcome the duke of York enjoyed in Edinburgh during his second exile in October 1680 was even used as royalist propaganda, its account printed in London to try and weaken the second Exclusion Parliament by making a show of the people of Scotland’s support towards the duke (A True Narrative). This popular welcome had been largely staged by Scotland’s Privy Council, and the people’s participation ordered under penalty of a hefty fine (Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, CP Angleterre 140).

16The exile of the king’s brother was additionally used to delay settling the matter of exclusion: having been sent away, the duke was presented as inoffensive, which lessened the urgency of the issue. This, as all the other sacrifices consented to by the king during the years of the Exclusion Crisis, was used both to defuse the situation and to stage his consent to the need of preserving the Crown and Church from extraneous influence (House of Lords, Journals 13 450-451). Since it was, however, obvious he did not do much in fact, these gestures had to be supplemented by a clear and powerful political narrative.

17This narrative was rooted in Charles II’s general attitude since the Restoration. Throughout the preceding twenty years, he had made himself appear as an impressionable, benevolent monarch with a lack of political ambition, in the habit of backing down when faced with parliamentary opposition. Many in England and abroad were convinced that the king was naturally inclined to consent to everything, not because of his vested interest in political consensus, but because he lacked the will and the concern. As the Spanish ambassador Borgomanero had put it when the Exclusion Crisis had begun, “the king is astonished by this matter, and he told me tonight it was necessary to take a resolution; I don’t know what it will be, but since he is of a slothful disposition it shall not be a strong one, nor likely to remedy such an illness” (Archives générales du Royaume, Secrétairie d’État et de guerre, T 091, vol. 492). This was all a mask, as Charles II had in fact pursued his very real ambitions covertly, through his advisors and his brother, with the financial help of the French and Spanish Crowns.

18The king made use of this image during the Exclusion Crisis, playing upon the people’s vision of him to impress upon them the conviction he would, in the end, consent to Exclusion if the pressure was strong and sustained long enough. He publicly reaffirmed at every turn his will to seek the MPs’ help in resolving the crisis and to consent to whatever was necessary for them to leave him in peace. At the same time, he exaggerated every gesture he consented to, making it appear each time as a heart-rending sacrifice. In March 1679, for example, when the decision was made to exile his brother – a decision that Charles had supported from the beginning – he went to great lengths to make it appear a grand and difficult gesture, one that should be enough to guarantee the kingdom’s safety. Before the House of Lords, he declared through the Lord Chancellor, Heneage Finch:

For now, you see, His Majesty of His own Accord hath done that which would have been very difficult for you to ask, and hath deprived Himself of the Conversation of His Royal and only Brother, by commanding Him to depart the Kingdom; to which Command His Royal Highness hath paid a most humble and most entire Submission and Obedience. This Separation was attended with a more than ordinary Sorrow on both Sides. But He that for your Sakes could part with such a Brother and such a Friend, you may be sure, hath now no Favourite but His People. Since, therefore, His Majesty hath shewn so much Readiness to concur with, and in a Manner to prevent, the Desires of His Parliament, it is a miserable Refuge our Enemies trust to, when they hope to see our Zeal outrun our Discretion, and that we ourselves should become the unhappy Occasion of making our own Councils abortive (House of Lords, Journals 13 449-453).

19This was a clear appeal to the idea of political consensus between the king and the people, upon which Charles II continued to build the Crown’s defence in the following years. To make the prospect of his consent to Exclusion more believable, the king kept negotiating with the Whig opposition until the end of the Crisis in 1681. As time went by, he seemed to concede more and more, gradually consenting to most of the Whig-dominated Commons’ demands. While always making clear that a complete exclusion of his brother from the succession was a red line, one he would not allow Parliament to cross, he appeared open to imposing limitations upon the power of a Catholic monarch. In April 1679, he had the Lord Chancellor make the following proposition in Parliament:

And therefore His Majesty, who hath often said in this Place, That he is ready to consent to any Laws of this kind (so as the same extend not to alter the Descent of the Crown in the right Line, nor to defeat the Succession), hath now commanded this to be further explained. And, to the end it may never be in the Power of any Papist, if the Crown descend upon him, to make any Change either in Church or State; I am commanded to tell you, That His Majesty is willing, That Provision may be made, first, to distinguish a Popish from a Protestant Successor; then to limit and circumscribe the Authority of a Popish Successor […]. God Almighty long continue this blessed Union between the King, and His Parliament, and People (House of Commons, Journals 607-608).

20At the same time, he appeared open to other suggestions, such as the idea of an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza to produce a male heir with another princess, or even to make his bastard son the duke of Monmouth heir to the crown. In January 1680, this appeared the preferred solution, and the French ambassador Jean-Paul de Barillon noted: “All of this will seem to be the result of Parliament’s will alone and the King of England will appear to be compelled to consent to it, but in truth nothing will be done without consultation, so His British Majesty’s reluctance will only be for show” (Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, CP Angleterre 138). None of these alternative solutions were ever satisfying enough, however, which allowed the king to never really consent to them in the end.

21Through this mixture of public speeches, gestures of goodwill and reassurances given privately to each major actor of the various factions at play, the king and his entourage managed to convince almost everyone, including the Whigs, that the Crown would, in the end, consent to the exclusion of the king’s brother from the succession. In late December 1680, Barillon, who was at that time in close contact with important Whig members in the House of Commons, noted that “the people in the House of Commons I am in business with all believe the king will consent to the exclusion bill” (Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, CP Angleterre 140).

22On March 21st 1681, as Parliament assembled in Oxford, the Whigs still hoped to pass the Exclusion Bill. On the 28th, however, this hope was crushed as the king decided to dissolve Parliament, ushering in three years of authoritarian rule, known as the “Tory reaction”. This was a gambit on the king’s part, one that was both a success, as it helped bring the Exclusion Crisis to a close without having consented to anything meaningful, and a failure, as this victory was won at a tremendous cost, the belief in the possibility of freely consented political consensus.

The end of the Restoration consensus

23While the last three years of Charles II’s reign have been described by many historians as a sudden, unexpected burst of authority from the king’s part, another analysis of this turnaround is possible. Indeed, the so-called “Tory reaction” was as much revenge against the Whigs’ climate of terror during the Crisis as the result of a simple realization, that political consensus was now clearly impossible to achieve, which warranted a new approach to government from Charles II.

24Up until 1681, everyone in England still wanted to believe a political consensus could be achieved, with the king acting as a neutral force bridging the deep divides left by the Civil Wars and Cromwellian period. This had worked for twenty years. No one had been happy with the political developments in the British Isles, neither the king, nor Parliament, not even the soldiers, the merchants of the City or, to the extent their opinion can be known to us, the majority of the English people. Still, it was better than civil war. And so, for all the disappointment the Restoration had brought, it had been tolerated because everyone still clung to this hope of reaching a consensus, and therefore, at every turn, everyone had consented.

25One example of this was the question of the English standing army. It was the focal point of a heated debate, most of the English people being against the idea of a standing army that could be used by the king to smother any attempt at dissent should he act like a tyrant, a fear that was all too credible given the career of Charles II’s last two predecessors. The Crown, however, was very much in favour of it, as the king and his advisors were afraid the fast-paced development of the continental armies would leave the British Isles a minor power without much influence in the world (Harris 2006, 64-66). Throughout the years, Parliament progressively consented to an increase in the number of troops: the English army went from only four regiments of guards to a force of 25,000 men in 1684, and 35,000 by 1688, which was almost the equivalent to the New Model Army at its peak in 1660. The king, on the other hand, had to consent not to use this army without Parliament’s approval and directed it against the enemies appointed by the assembly, even when it happened to be his long-standing ally and main paymaster, Louis XIV. This consensus was, therefore, at the heart of the shift in alliances which occurred during the years 1674-79: at first, Charles II switched from an alliance with France to one with Spain, in the hope of reaching a consensus with Parliament on the role and relevance of a permanent army. Then, when it became clear by the end of 1678 Parliament would never consent to the financial effort necessary to keep these regiments permanently, the king, abandoning hope of reaching a consensus, returned covertly to the French alliance, relying upon French subsidies to salvage what he could from his new troops.

26The way consent was managed during the Exclusion Crisis clearly showed to everyone this style of government had reached its limits, because trust had been openly breached on both sides. The king had shown on multiple occasions he could not be trusted and that his consent was mere appearance enabling manipulation. This had been made visible, for example, in the case of the Earl of Danby. Thomas Osborne, who had been Lord High Treasurer and the main advisor to the king since 1673, was the first victim of the Exclusion Crisis. In December 1678 letters were produced allegedly proving his collusion with the French king, which provided the grounds for his impeachment. After an attempt at dissolving Parliament to protect him, the king finally appeared to consent to his trial, only to grant him in secret a full royal pardon, which Danby produced on the first day of his trial. This caused an uproar in the Commons and was considered by the Whigs, especially, as a proof the king could not be trusted (Harris 2006, 175-179). The end of the Crisis cemented this distrust towards the king, because it made quite apparent, he had, in fact, never had any intention of consenting to any form of political exclusion of his brother.

27On the other hand, the Crisis had also convinced the king that Parliament could not be trusted. The way the Whigs used their political momentum to attack everyone at Court who did not share their political views and the way they did not consider their demands met sufficiently with the first sacrifices made by the king impressed upon Charles and his closest advisors the dangers of this style of government. This is visible in the shift operated in the king’s official rhetoric during the Exclusion Crisis. While his addresses to Parliament before 1680 always relied upon the invocation of consensus through the staging of consent, this changed starting with the second convocation of the Exclusion Parliament in October 1680. In December 1680, in his first publicly reported speech to the Commons since the opening of the session – one he ensured would be repeated exactly by forwarding the Speaker a copy of his speech – the king offered “to concur with you in any Remedies which might consist with preserving the Succession of the Crown in its due and legal Course of Descent. […] And, being thus ready, on My Part, to do all that can reasonably be expected from Me, I should be glad to know from you, as soon as may be, how far I shall be assisted by you” (House of Commons, Journals 679).

28This was a dramatic shift in perspective, the king now presenting himself as the one who knew what needed doing and only asking for Parliament’s support in enforcing his policy. The notions of “consent” and “assent” disappear from the king’s speeches from this moment on and are consistently replaced by the appeal to a “concurrence” which clearly amounted to a form of submission from Parliament. This was made clear a few weeks later, when the king sent word to the Commons following their vote of a new Exclusion Bill, to tell them:

He therefore thinks there remains nothing more for Him to say, in Answer to the Address of this House, but to recommend to them the Consideration of all other Means for the Preservation of the Protestant Religion; in which they have no Reason to doubt of His Concurrence, whenever they shall be presented to Him in a Parliamentary Way. (House of Commons, Journals 699)

29This was quickly followed by the dissolution of Parliament. When the next one, gathered at Oxford, showed signs of going in the same direction, it was dissolved too, only a week after convening. The message this sent was clear: the king did not believe in consensus anymore. As the duke of York put it himself in his memoirs: “his Majesty had at last taken those vigorous councells, and resolute methods the Duke had so long press'd him too, and was convinced by experience of what his Royal Highness had continually inculcated, that there was no compounding matters with that sort of people” (James Stuart 733). While great care was taken to stage the sadness of the king and to pin the blame upon the Whigs, it did not mean however this convinced the English public sphere. It did not mean, either, that consensus was no longer needed for the political balance of the realm.

*

30That Charles II felt he could do without consensus starting from 1681 was largely due to a shift in the way the Crown established its power and legitimacy. While, in 1660, he had mostly relied upon the Crown’s popularity and the public support of the people to rule, this popularity was largely extinguished by the end of Charles II’s reign. Not only was it not efficient anymore to rely upon it, but it now carried an important risk, as Parliament was starting to ask for proof of the king’s commitment and demanding more and more powerful gestures from him. Therefore, the shift towards a more authoritarian style of government can be simply seen as the pragmatical acknowledgment, on the king’s part, of the need to try something else.

31The Crown, however, was still fragile and, while republicans were few and did not yield much influence, all this talk about excluding the king’s brother from the succession had opened a door that had been previously tightly closed, the possibility for the people of England to choose their king. In this sense, the Exclusion Crisis, and notably the way it was publicly managed by the king, clearly paved the way for the Glorious Revolution. In 1688, when the opposition to James II called upon William of Orange to take the Crown, Parliament immediately felt the need to address the issue Charles’ dissolution of the Oxford Parliament had raised. Since it was made clear that the search for a political consensus could be waived when it was not working the way the king wanted it to, Parliament needed guarantees it would not happen again, a way to hold the king true to his commitment to governing with the people’s representatives. In a way, then, Charles II’s triumph over Parliament during the Exclusion Crisis directly inspired the need for the Bill of Rights of 1689, which was the first official attempt at imposing political consensus as a style of government.

32This was not, however, the only way in which the Exclusion Crisis furthered reflection on the need for political consensus in the British realms and how it could be achieved. Not only did the Crisis give birth to the first political parties of British history, the Whigs and the Tories, but it also showed accountability of the Crown’s decisions could be a useful tool to achieve the much-needed political consensus. Among the many things Charles II had to consent to in order to stage his global consent to Exclusion, one had seemed quite minor but was to have great repercussions. Impeachment gave Parliament the means to seize a minister’s papers, to determine if he had, for example, embezzled money or led a policy that was contrary to the interests of the kingdom. This was used against Danby, the Commons asking to see the books of the Exchequer he had managed. This was also used against Samuel Pepys, commissioner of the Admiralty since 1673. From his cell in the Tower of London, Pepys prepared a meticulous defence, drawing accounts of the Navy state and costs throughout the last decade. While his trial never occurred, the Crown consented to these accounts being produced in Parliament, to ask for more money to withstand the costs of the fleet. While consenting to account for the Crown’s expenses seemed of small prejudice at the time, this created a very influential precedent. It led to the idea that, since the king could not be trusted blindly, he was to give proof of his good intentions and management of resources to the nation’s representatives if he wanted them to consent to his political demands, especially if they implied levying new taxes. Thus, the idea that political consensus was to be found in mutual control and accountability, rather than consent, emerged from the Exclusion Crisis.

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Bibliographie

Primary sources

A True Narrative of the Reception of their Royal Highnesses at their Arrival in Scotland. Edinburgh, London and Dublin, 1680.

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Notes

1 This tale was at the heart of Charles II’s royal propaganda from his exile to his death. When he made his royal entry in London in 1661, the first of the three triumphal arches he passed through was built around the memory of this event and the budding myth of the “Royal Oak” (Ogilby, Entertainment 37-38). From this point onward, the Oak was one of the main images used by royalist propaganda aimed at a popular audience.

2 The court and courtiers were willing participants in this endeavour. One of the most famous examples of the way Charles II’s court acted as a machinery to project this image can be found in Rochester’s A Satire on king Charles II, the poem from which the “Merry monarch” moniker came from (see Davis 46).

3 Forged by two adventurers following the assassination of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in 1678, the Popish Plot was a fake plot aiming at killing Charles II in order to put his catholic brother James on the throne and restore Catholicism in England. This provoked such fear in England it led to a massive display of public violence which ushered three years of political crisis known as the Exclusion Crisis.

4 The only thing to which Parliament was asked to consent was taxation. Without this consent, raising new taxes was held to be illegal, even though this practice only relied upon custom and did not come to be written in law until the Bill of Rights was passed in 1689. Even so, the word “consent” was not used by MPs in their official capacity: it was part of the king’s vocabulary, and it was the king who asked for Parliament’s consent in these matters (House of Commons, Journals 607-608).

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Emmanuel Lemée, « The End of the Restoration Consensus: Staging Consent and its Limits during the Exclusion Crisis »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2025, consulté le 15 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/15770 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ffj

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Auteur

Emmanuel Lemée

Emmanuel Lemée is teaching at the University of Picardie Jules Verne. His PhD dissertation studied the role and power of prince James Stuart while he was brother and heir to Charles II. He has published in several journals and collective volumes, on topics such as the use of emotion in early modern diplomacy or the rise of the British army during the reign of Charles II. His main research areas are anthropology of early modern diplomacy and European history of the late seventeenth-century, focusing on the British Restoration. Email: emmanuel.lemee@u-picardie.fr

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8245-8952

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