Trial and execution

In January 1649 the House of Commons passed an Act of Parliament creating a court for Charles’s trial. After the first Civil War, the parliamentarians still believed that the King, although wrong, had been able to justify his fight, and that he would still be entitled to limited powers as King under a new constitutional settlement. It was now felt that by provoking the second Civil War while in captivity, Charles showed himself dishonourable, and re­sponsible for unjustifiable bloodshed.

The idea of trying a king was a novel one; previous mon- archs had been deposed, but had never been brought to trial as monarchs. The High Court of justice established by the Act con­sisted of 135 Commissioners (all firm Parliamentarians). His trial on charges of high treason and «other high crimes» began on 20 January 1649, but Charles refused to enter a plea, claiming that no court had jurisdiction over a monarch. He believed that his own authority to rule had been given to him by God when he was crowned. The court, by contrast, proposed that no man is above the law. Over a period of a week, when Charles was asked to plead three times, he refused. However fifty-nine of the Commissioners signed Charles’s death warrant. On 30 January 1649 Charles I was beheaded.

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Charles II(1660-1685)

War and government

Charles II could not undo the effects of the Revolution, but they were not all negative. The Commonwealth had had to fight for its survival, and in the process England had become a po­tent military power. Wars against France and Spain had expanded English colonial dominions. Dunkirk and Jamaica were seized, Barbados was colonized, and the North American colonies flour­ished. Colonial trade was an important source of royal revenue, and Charles II continued Cromwell’s policy of restricting trade to English ships and imposing duties on imports and exports. The Navigation Acts (1660 and 1663) were directed against the Dutch, still the most powerful commercial force in Europe. This policy of Charles II resulted in the Dutch Wars (1665—67; 1672—74) which in economic terms were an English triumph. The American colonies were consolidated by the capture of New York, and the policy of the Navigation Acts was effectively established. Colonial trade and English shipping mushroomed.

In the long run Charles’s aggressive foreign policy solved the crown’s perpetual fiscal crises. But in the short run it made mat­ters worse. The London plague (1665) and fire (1666) were inter­preted as divine judgements against a sinful nation. These catas­trophes were compounded when the Dutch burned a large portion of the English fleet in 1667. The crown’s debts led to the Stop of the Exchequer (1672), by which Charles suspended payment of his bills. The king now ruled through a group of ministers known as the Cabal, an anagram of the first letters of their names. None of the five was Anglican, and two were Roman Catholic.

Charles had wearied of repressive Anglicanism, underestimat­ing its strength among rural gentry and clergy, and desired compre­hension and toleration in his church. This fit with his foreign-pol- icy objectives, for in the Treaty of Dover (1670) he allied himself with Catholic France against Protestant Holland. In exchange he received a large subsidy from Louis XIV, and in the treaty’s secret clauses, known only to the king’s Catholic ministers, the promise of an even larger one if Charles undertook, at some unspecified moment, to declare himself a Catholic. That moment came for the king on his deathbed, by which time his brother and heir, the Duke of York, had already openly professed his conversion.

In 1672 Charles promulgated the Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended the penal code against all religious nonconform­ists, Catholic and dissenter alike. But a declaration of toleration could not bring together these mortal enemies, and the king found himself faced by a unified Protestant front. Parliamentary An­glicans would not vote money for war until the Declaration was abrogated. The passage of the Test Act(1673), which the king reluctantly signed, effectively barred all but Anglicans from hold­ing national office and forced the Duke of York to resign the admiralty.

By bribes, Charles built up a body of support in Parliament which could be relied upon for a majority. They came to be called “tories” by their opponents. “Tory” had been a term of abuse for Irish Catholic bandits. The tory and whig groups were known by their disagreement over the authoritarianism of the Crown. The tories were sympathetic to the doctrine of divine right and favoured a doctrinally high church. The tories represented landed property and the established church, and usually wore blue in contrast to the purple of royalty. Many royalists became tories. The whigs refused to accept the sacrosanct character of the mon­archy. The whigs opined that government depended upon consent of the people and that the people had a right of resistance. They subordinated the Crown to Parliament. The whigs represented the dissenters and the mercantile classes, and often wore red. Many former Puritans became whigs. “Whig” had been a term of abuse for Scots Presbyterian rebels and horse thieves.

Under Charles II, the Treasury as a supreme financial body separated from the Exchequer as a depository of revenue. A gold guinea coin was issued. From 1690, government policy was con­trolled by specific appropriations. Money bills had to originate in the Commons, and could not be amended by the House of Lords.

In 1679 Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act,which gave sheriffs just three days to respond to a writ of habeas corpus. Thus, men and women could no longer be penned up in prison for months without being charged with a crime or brought to trial. As Winston Churchill points out in his History of the English Speak­ing Peoples, “No Englishman, however great or however humble, could be imprisoned for more than a few days without grounds being shown against him in open court according to the settled law of the land.”

Janies II (1685-1688)

Charles II died without legitimate offspring in 1685, convert­ing to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed. James was crowned on April 23, 1685. At first, there was little overt opposition to the new Sovereign. The new Parliament which assembled in May 1685 seemed favourable to James, agreeing to grant him a large income.

James, however, faced several rebellions. The king’s judges punished the rebels brutally. Judge Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes(when Jeffreys with four other judges tried persons accused of having had any share in the rebellion) provoked little comment at the time and were seen by many as an appropriate response to an armed rebellion. To protect himself from further rebellions, James sought to establish a large standing army. By putting Roman Catholics in charge of several regiments, the King was drawn into a conflict with Parliament.

Religious tension intensified from 1686. James tried to get rid of the Test Act (which prevented the Catholics from holding pub­lic employments) and controversially allowed Roman Catholics to occupy the highest offices of the Kingdom. The King displaced Protestant officers from the army and got Catholics into their places. In the Declaration of Indulgence (1687), also known as the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, James suspended laws punishing Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters.

Glorious Revolution (1688)

7 In April 1688, James re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence, subsequently ordering Anglican clergymen to read it in their churches. Then the Archbishop of Canterbury William Sancroft and six other bishops (known as the Seven Bishops) wrote out a petition asking to reconsider the King’s religious policies. The bishops were arrested and tried for libel. However, the jury gave a verdict of not guilty.

In June, 1688, between the petition and the trial the queen had given birth to a son. The entirely new prospect of a Catholic successor (for both the king’s daughters were Protestants) deter­mined a number of the nobles and the Bishop of London to invite the Prince of Orange who was James’s son-in-law and nephew over to England.

On June 30, 1688, a group of Protestant nobles requested the Prince of Orange to come to England with an army. On Novem­ber 5, 1668, William’s fleet anchored in Devonshire, some of the gentry joined his army. James believed that his own army would be adequate but it began to falter. One after another, the king’s most important officers and friends deserted him and went over to Wil­liam. His own daughter, Anne, fled from the palace. On Decem­ber 11, 1688, James attempted to flee to France, first throwing the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames. He was, however, caught in Kent. Having no desire to make James a martyr, the Prince of Orange let him escape on December 23, 1688.

There had been a council of the lords and the authorities of London. When the Prince of Orange came, on the day after the king’s departure, he summoned the lords to meet him. It was fi­nally resolved by these authorities that the throne was vacant by the conduct of King James II, that it was inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a Catholic prince, that the Prince and Princess of Orange should be king and queen during their lives and the life of the survivor of them, and that their children should succeed them, if they had any. That if they had none the Princess Anne and her children should succeed; that if she had none the heirs of the Prince of Orange should succeed.

On January 13, 1689, the prince and princess, sitting on a throne in Whitehall, bound themselves to these conditions. The Act that was signed is commonly referred to as the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights charged James II with abusing his power; amongst other things, it criticised the suspension of the Test Acts, the prosecution of the Seven Bishops for merely petitioning the Crown, the establishment of a standing army and the imposition of cruel punishments. The Bill also stipulated that no Catholic would henceforth be permitted to ascend to the English throne, nor could any English monarch marry a Catholic. The Sover­eign was required in his coronation oath to swear to maintain the Protestant religion. The Act, furthermore, settled the question of succession to the Crown.

The Bill was designed to ensure Parliament could function free from royal interference. The Sovereign was forbidden from suspending laws which Parliament had passed or imposing taxes without Parliamentary consent. The Sovereign was not allowed to interfere with elections or freedom of speech, and proceed­ings in Parliament were not to be questioned in the courts or in any body outside Parliament itself. (This was the basis of modern parliamentary privilege.) The Sovereign was required to summon Parliament frequently (the Triennial Act of 1694 reinforced this by requiring the regular summoning of Parliaments).

Parliament tightened control over the King’s expenditure; the financial settlement reached with William and Mary deliberately made them dependent upon Parliament, as one Member of Par­liament said, ‘when princes have not needed money they have not needed us’. Finally, the King was forbidden to maintain a standing army in time of peace without Parliament’s consent.

The Bill of Rights added further defences of individual rights. The King was forbidden to establish his own courts or to act as a judge himself, and the courts were forbidden to impose excessive bail or fines, or cruel and unusual punishments.

However, the Sovereign could still summon and dissolve Par­liament, appoint and dismiss Ministers, veto legislation and de­clare war.

The Settlement Act of 1701 was the final act to fully establish the supremacy of Parliament. King William’s War, a series of con­tinental battles fought primarily to push Protestantism, had heavily taxed English economic resources; to retaliate, The Settlement Act forbade wars without Parliament’s consent. The act forbade members of the House of Commons, as well as all non-indigenous people, from holding public office and subjected ministerial ap­pointments to parliamentary approval. Judges were removed from royal punishment, as they had to now be formally impeached by the House of Parliament, with no royal pardon.

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Date: 2016-01-14; view: 869