Gibson William. James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

130 James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops

of the sovereign, whether Parliament was in session or not; therefore, if

the bishops were peers, they would be free to present petitions.

The King’s lawyers argued that nothing better confirmed that the

bishops had challenged the King’s power than the crowd which had

turned up to the court that day, since the willingness to dispute the

King’s power and authority had a destabilising effect. The bishops had

an opportunity to raise their concerns in Parliament, and the King’s

intention to call a Parliament in the autumn was known to the bishops,

so that they had deliberately ignored the opportunity to legally raise

their grievance.

After these legal arguments, the Lord Chief Justice asked the Solicitor-

General to ‘come close to the business, for it is very late’. But the Solicitor-

General had one further point, which was to respond to Mr Justice

Holloway’s question of what would he have had the bishops do to solve

their consciences, especially given that the Parliament was only to be

held in November. The response was that they should have acquiesced

until the meeting of Parliament. The record noted ‘At which some People

in the court hissed’. The Attorney-General jumped up and said ‘This is

very fine, indeed; I hope the court, and the Jury, will take notice of this

Carriage’.

The Lord Chief Justice said that he thought that the bishops were

entitled to petition the King, and were not required only to do so

through Parliament. But if they had the right to petition the King

‘they ought to have done it after another manner’. If they petitioned

in the way they had, it made the government ‘very precarious’. As the

trial came towards its close, Serjeant Baldock insisted on the right to

address the court. He didn’t deny that subjects had the right to peti-

tion the King, but they also had the duty to obey him. He refused

to enter the discussion of whether the King possessed the dispensing

power, or whether Parliament had denied the King that right. He

simply advanced the view that the only thing the bishops were

commanded to do was to order the Declaration to be read in their

dioceses. He accused the bishops of asserting that the King had done

an illegal thing, and this alone was a seditious libel. He concluded, ‘I

shall leave it here to your Lordship, and the Jury, whether they ought

not to Answer for it.’

The Lord Chief Justice hoped the case would close with Baldock’s

comments, but Serjeant Trinder also demanded the right to speak. The

Lord Chief Justice weakly protested ‘How unreasonable is this now, that

we must have so many Speeches at this time of Day? But we must hear

it; go on Brother.’ Trinder raised the red herring of whether, if the King’s

The Trial 131

claim to dispensing power were illegal, the case would fall? The Lord

Chief Justice brusquely retorted: ‘That is quite out of the Case.’

In summation, the Lord Chief Justice briefly went back through the

evidence. Some felt that the show of public support for the bishops,

particularly among the peerage, had unsettled Wright. However, he

concluded that the dispensing power was irrelevant, and that the only

issue for the jury was whether the bishops’ petition was in effect a

publication of a seditious libel. This was where the Lord Chief Justice

made a grave error. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as

today, juries were only permitted to decide matters of fact, in this case

whether the libel, the petition, had been published. It was a legal judge-

ment, a matter for the judges to rule, whether the libel was seditious.

But the Lord Chief Justice permitted the jury to decide on both issues.

Here, James was badly served by his own placemen. The Lord Chief

Justice explained that anything that disturbed the government could

be termed a libel, and briefly he gave them his own view: ‘I do take it

to be a Libel.’ Having indicated his view, the Lord Chief Justice invited

his fellow judges to give their opinions. Mr Justice Holloway, noting

how remarkable it was for anyone to give their view after the Lord Chief

Justice, said that this was a remarkable trial. He briefly reviewed the

case and concluded that it was the right of all subjects to petition the

King and that the bishops were only guilty if they had done so with

ill intent. But Holloway observed, ‘I cannot think it is a Libel: It is left

to you, Gentlemen, but that is my Opinion.’ The Lord Chief Justice

irritably retorted that he had not asked his fellow judges to comment

on the trial, but just to give their legal opinion. Mr Justice Allybone said

that no man could write against the exercise of government without

committing a libel and that the King of England was an ‘absolute

sovereign’. Consequently, ‘this, say I, is a Libel ...’ Allybone’s reputation

had suffered more than many involved in the trial. Macaulay claimed

he showed ‘gross ignorance of law and history’, and ‘brought on him

the contempt of all who heard him’. More recently, William Speck has

claimed his comments were ‘a perfectly valid summary of the law as

it stood’ in 1688.

Mr Justice Powell, who had been a pupil of Jeremy

Taylor in Wales, astonished the court by arguing that the dispensing

power the King claimed ‘amounts to an abrogation and utter repeal of

all laws’, and that there was no difference between the dispensing power

and abolishing parliament. He summed up simply, ‘Truly, I cannot see,

for my part, any thing of Sedition, or any other Crime, fixed upon these

Reverend Fathers, my Lords the Bishops.’ In 1689, Sir John Hawles, MP

for Old Sarum, was to claim that the other judges’ apparent support for

132 James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops

the dispensing power was not advanced out of conviction: ‘some did it

out of weakness, others out of fear, and not out of the dictates of their

judgement’.

The exhausted Lord Chief Justice then committed the case to the jury

and, as was customary, asked ‘Gentlemen of the Jury, have you a mind to

drink before you go?’ Wine was sent for and the jury was asked whether

they wanted to have any of the papers to review as evidence. They were

given the statute book, but the Attorney-General tried to prevent them

having the bishops’ petition also. However, the Lord Chief Justice allowed

the jury to have copies of the petition and the King’s Declaration. The

official record noted: ‘Then the court arose, and the Jury went together

to Consider of their Verdict, and stayed together all Night, without Fire

or Candle.’ So a major constitutional point was debated overnight in

complete darkness, the jury were also denied bread, tobacco and drink.

About midnight they were reported ‘very loud out among one another’.

At four in the morning, they called for basins of water and towels which

they were allowed.

By some accounts, when the jury began delibera-

tion it was split 7–5 for acquittal and gradually eroded the views of the

five in favour of conviction.

Some rumours spread that the last juror

to concede was a brewer, dependent upon royal patronage, who held

up the verdict until 6 a.m.

It is clear that the bishops, or at least some

of them, expected to be convicted. Sancroft and Turner both prepared

speeches for such an eventuality and Sancroft pointedly told Bishop

Sprat, well-known for his love of luxury, that he knew how to survive

on £60 a year.

Sancroft was also well-informed: his agent, Mr Ince,

reported all the news of the jury to Sancroft, including their demand

for water and towels at 4 o’clock, and the noise from the jury room,

in a note written from the Bell Tavern in King Street at 6 o’clock that

morning.

The acquittal

The court reassembled the next day at nine o’clock. The jury responded

to the question whether they had reached a verdict. They indicated

they had and the foreman, Sir Robert Langley, delivered the verdict

of not guilty. ‘At which there were several great Shouts in the court,

and throughout the Hall.’ Clarendon recalled the cry was so loud ‘one

would have thought the Hall had cracked’. The Solicitor-General asked

the Lord Chief Justice to take one of those rejoicing, a member of Grays

Inn, into custody and he was reproved by the Lord Chief Justice. He

then said ‘Sir, I am as glad as you can be, that my Lords the Bishops are

The Trial 133

acquitted; but your Manner of rejoycing here in court is Indecent, you

might rejoyce in your Chamber, or elsewhere, and not here.’ Edward

Clark wrote that the verdict was received with ‘inexpressible joy of all

Good Protestants, signified by their loud acclamations even in ye Hall

sitting all the courts of Justice, which by the multitudes of the people

attending was soe great that they were plainly heard through most parts

of ye City’.

It was a verdict later claimed to the ‘immortal honour’ of

the jury.

The Marquis of Halifax, overcome with excitement, waved his hat

over his head, cried ‘Huzza!’ He was later to claim that the bishops’

trial had brought the people of England together ‘and bound them

with a knot that cannot easily be untied’.

The crowd took up the

shout from him; it filled the hall, and was repeated by others waiting

in Palace Yard and around Westminster Abbey. Sir John Reresby

called it ‘a little rebellion in noise though not in fact’.

Solicitor-

General William Williams was hissed and Bishop Cartwright called

a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’.

The news quickly spread through

London. Surrounded by congratulating friends, the bishops left

Westminster Hall. It happened to be St Peter’s day, and the bells were

chiming for morning prayers. Sancroft extricated himself from the

crowd by entering the Chapel Royal at Whitehall with the six other

bishops. Together, in the King’s new Catholic chapel, they offered

up their prayers and thanksgivings for their acquittal. By a happy

coincidence, the New Testament reading for the day was from the

twelfth chapter of the Book of Acts, recording St Peter’s miraculous

deliverance from prison. When Sancroft returned to Lambeth, the

grenadiers from Lord Lichfield’s regiment formed an escort, lining

the route from the river to the entrance to the palace, each asking

his blessing.

The news travelled so fast that a friend of Sir Charles

Kemys, writing from London on the morning of the acquittal, did

not include all the details as ‘they could not fail to come to you’, but

he indicated that ‘everybody here this morning is engaged in it [the

acquittal] the one way or the other’.

As one anonymous author later

wrote, ‘the nation now began to be in high ferment’.

The rejoicing

of the people continued all day, and into the night, during which

Mr Coggs, beadle of the Duchy Liberty in London, was accidentally

killed in the celebrations.

That night, between Charing Cross and Somerset House alone, there

were 56 bonfires, and they were often burnt in front of the homes of

known Catholics. James, in exasperation, threatened to quarter troops

in London.

The Lord Mayor did all he could to suppress bonfires,

134 James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops

but in vain. He had had some warning since the London mob had

lit bonfires when the bishops had been granted bail, assuming they

had been acquitted.

Some illuminations were in the form of seven

golden candlesticks, of which the tallest represented Sancroft, the other

six represented the bishops. This was a clear allusion to the sacred

candlesticks in the Book of Revelation.

The commercial classes took immediate advantage of the demand

for episcopal memorabilia. The Huguenot engraver, Simon Gribelin,

produced two engravings of the events. The first image represented

the seven bishops as the seven churches of Asia Minor referred to in

the Book of Revelation, and a quotation from Revelation was engraved

on the image. A second engraving contained a portrait of each of the

seven bishops on a candlestick. The allusion was clear: the bishops’

persecution was part of the extraordinary events that would lead to the

Apocalypse.

A silver medal was designed and struck, having a portrait

of Archbishop Sancroft in the centre, and those of the six bishops

associated with him in his imprisonment and trial grouped round him.

Such was the demand for these medals that a cheaper, bronze, version

was also struck. Before long, the broadsheet ballads that circulated

in London were also celebrating the bishops. In The Prince of Orange

Welcome to London the events leading up to the invasion were recounted

including

The Bishops away to the Tower was sent

As stout and as cheerful as martyrs they went

Not fearing what ever might fall to their doom

They scorn to submit to the Clergy of Rome ...

Now while the true church thus did tottering stand

It was a great grief to most men in this land

But while we with sorrowful sighings did grieve

Each fryar and Jesuits caught in their sleeve.

About the same time appeared, A Third Touch of the Times, which recited:

Nothing would serve you but Protestants ruin

Rackings and Gallows and Knives and Fire

You had provided, but ‘twas your undoing

Now you shall have them your selves for hire

Yea so unbridled was your Power

(tho’ they no evil had deserv’d)

You must go send the Bishops to Tower

But now your rogueships shall worse be served.

The Trial 135

The same was the import of A View of the Popish Plot, which was decorated

by a woodcut of a bishop burning at the stake, redolent of the reign of

‘Bloody Mary’.

It was not only in London that the people rejoiced, as news spread

the rest of the country joined the celebrations. John Stevens wrote in

his diary:

The first hardened piece of insolence that I observed, was upon

the news of the 7 Bishops being released, at which time in Welsh

Poole in Montgomeryshire where I commonly resided, & many

other places about, were made public bonfires in contempt of His

Majesty’s Proclamation forbidding the same, or rather in defiance of

his authority.

Bonfires were also lit at, among other places, Bedford, Bristol,

Cambridge, Exeter, Gloucester, Lichfield, Norwich, Oxford, Salisbury

and Tamworth.

Simon Patrick recorded

I cannot but here remember with what joy the news of their being

cleared was received at Peterborough. The bells rang out from

three o’clock in the morning till night; when several bonfires

were made ... whereas the day before, which was a thanksgiving for

the birth of the Prince of Wales, the bells did not stir till twelve

o’clock.

Similarly at St Giles in the Fields soon after the trial, when prayers

were said for the royal family, the congregation fell silent and refused

to read the prayers, instead they laughed and talked to each other.

In Scotland, where Anglicanism was not altogether well-regarded,

Sir George Mackenzie, the Lord Advocate, wrote to Sancroft, ‘it will

doubtless be strange news to heare that the Bishops of England are

in great veneration among the Presbyterians of Scotland, and I am

glad that reason has retain’d so much of its old empire among men’.

Other leaders of the Scottish Presbyterian church – usually hostile to

Anglicans – also wrote letters of support to the bishops.

Across the country, grand juries refused to present or indict those who

had celebrated the acquittal with bonfires, despite in Northamptonshire

being subjected to a long diatribe to do so by the judge. At Winchester,

when asked to present members of a mob for their part in the celebra-

tions, the grand jury refused and instead presented the Catholic JP for

holding office in violation of the Test Act.

Juries were emboldened on

other religious matters; Middlesex magistrates found that the grand jury

136 James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops

refused to return bills against Dissenters ‘such kindness men generally

had for the bishops and the Protestant religion’.

At Oxford, only Magdalen College and Christ Church had bonfires

to celebrate the birth of the heir, the other colleges remained silent.

But some people used the celebration of the birth as a covert way of

toasting the bishops. On the news of the acquittal of the bishops,

Arthur Charlett reported ‘people in these parts will drink Bps Healths,

the Bps Council and the Bps Jury’. In delight at the acquittal, a boy

let a cat loose during the service at University College chapel, where

the Catholic Obadiah Walker was Master.

At Peterborough, the bells

rang all day and in Somerset effigies of the baby Prince of Wales were

burnt.

Even High Church Tories, like Edmund Bohun, referred to the

infant as ‘the pretended Prince of Wales’.

In Suffolk, Isaac Archer claimed that everyone rejoiced except the

Catholics.

Certainly, the Dissenters seem to have been as relieved as

the Anglicans.

Roger Morrice found that the acquittal of the bishops

had changed his mind; it had shown the solidarity of Church and

Dissent. As Mark Goldie claimed, ‘Morrice displayed in microcosm the

nation’s painful realignments between Catholicism, Anglicanism and

Dissent’.

In Warwickshire, there were celebrations in five towns and

in Warwick the celebrations were led by the parish of St Mary’s. Some

clergy had felt the trial of the bishops very keenly. Lancelot Addison,

Dean of Lichfield, felt himself also to have been on trial with the bishops

because he felt so precisely their view of the Declaration.

In Lichfield,

a ‘very great ryot’ greeted the news of the acquittal, the crowd celebrated

with fireworks and the magistrates tried to disperse the crowd but were

beaten with sticks.

In York, Sir John Reresby, the governor, reported

that the streets were crammed with cheering people.

In Bristol, where Trelawny was bishop, ‘all the bells rang, they gave

very large expressions of joy and at night bonfires were made in many

parts of this city’, and the medals struck to celebrate the trial were

distributed.

In Exeter, the news of the acquittal of the bishops, which

only reached the city on 2 July, was met with bonfires, rejoicing and

riots, and shouts of ‘stand by the Church of England and Bishops!’ The

loyalist but equivocal bishop of Exeter, Thomas Lamplugh, had refused

to sign the petition against the Declaration though he had not asked the

clergy to read it, but Bishop Trelawny was widely admired in the West,

consequently at the first sign of trouble Lamplugh fled the city.

From

the evidence of the prosecution of rioters, it is clear that they included

respectable citizens – goldsmiths, vinters and merchants – as well as

the ‘mob’. One of the centres of disturbance was the cathedral close,

The Trial 137

perhaps in recognition of the fact that the dean of Exeter had refused to

read the King’s Declaration in the cathedral. Ironically, the men respon-

sible for suppressing the violence, and calling out the corporation fire

engine, were the Dissenters who James had admitted to the corporation

in November 1687 to replace the stubbornly non-compliant Tory corpo-

ration. In a strange reversal of fortunes, the city JP, Thomas Crispin, who

had previously been prosecuted for holding Presbyterian conventicles

now prosecuted Anglicans for their disturbance of the peace.

Further

west in Cornwall, Trelawny’s patrimony, the bells of Pelynt were rung

and the mayor fired the town cannon, as did the mayor of Looe.

On the evening of the acquittal, James, inspecting his army at

Hounslow, heard the soldiers cheer. He asked what the cheer was and

Lord Feversham replied ‘nothing but the soldiers’ joy at the bishops’

acquittal’. James replied, ‘you call that nothing?’ But in public he was

said to have commented ‘Well! And what’s that?’

He returned to

London the next day, and outlawed public assemblies.

The only good

news James got that month was Sunderland’s stage-managed conversion

to Catholicism, though he soon argued against the increasingly fraught

attempt to get a Parliament to repeal the Test Act.

On 2 July, James authorised publication of The Clergy’s Late Carriage to

the King Considered. It railed against the Church for its disobedience but

also expressed the King’s bewilderment at the betrayal of the Church.

‘The King was not only not obeyed by the clergy, where there was no

sin in it, but where the obedience was purely ministerial. Had it been

to renounce their own religion, or to receive His, it had been some-

thing ... this is something surprising.’ There was also confusion at the

bishops’ behaviour: ‘this looks with an ill air, and carries too great a

contradiction for men of their function and learning; and yet so it must

be, or they are insincere in their petition.’ The objection of the bishops

and clergy was dismissed as ‘a cavil and not a scruple’. The bishops had,

it was concluded, created an artificial scare:

they have acted, I mean their mock martyrdom, to force suffering

and act it to a farce. What else can be their blessing people ten deep

of a side with ‘Have a ware of your religion’, ‘be faithful to your reli-

gion’, ‘the Lord strengthen you’ etc and whilst not one tittle of their

religion, but the liberty of other men’s was the case: what shall an

honest man think of this?

The bishops were left with a significant legal bill, though the jury

declined the traditional offer of 20 guineas for a meal, which would

138 James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops

normally be charged to them. The fees of their legal team was nearly

£250, but there was almost £150 in other expenses. The bishops taxed

themselves at 6 per cent of their annual incomes to pay the bill, rather

than force the poorest to pay as much as the wealthiest.

The total

raised was over £600, of which £120 was spent on gratuities. Their

solicitor received £48 and Somers, as junior counsel, received £32.

The bishops were also aware that they would be likely to be under

threat from James. In some scribbled notes, which Archbishop Sancroft

made for himself a few days after the acquittal, he suggested that they

should ‘establish a correspondence [with Dissenters]’, he also specu-

lated how the bishops should behave ‘in case of a Popish visitation’

and, most significantly, he laid down that ‘the way of writing to the

Archbishop is for every man to write to a private friend, and for him

to deliver the letter to my Lord Archbishop’. A clandestine network of

correspondents for the bishops was established. What is remarkable is

the number of women who appeared in the list of secret correspondent

addresses: Bishop Lloyd of St Asaph’s contact was Lady Salisbury, Francis

Turner of Ely’s was Mrs Nalson or Madam Womock; Bishop Lake of

Chichester’s was Mrs Elizabeth Rowe; Bishop White of Peterborough’s

was a Mrs Clark. Possibly women’s correspondence was less likely to be

searched or read than men’s.

Short as the imprisonment and trial of Sancroft and the six bishops

had been, it led to the most disastrous consequences for James, by

producing an irreconcilable breach between him and the bishops. It

was the more ill-judged on his part because it deprived the birth of

his son of the most important and unimpeachable of witnesses, the

Archbishop of Canterbury. If Sancroft had been present, and deposed

that he was in the chamber when the prince was born, no one would

have believed the later bed-pan stories. As it was, the Orange faction

took every occasion to convert his enforced absence into circumstan-

tial evidence that a spurious child had been imposed on the nation.

But undoubtedly the most significant effect of the trial and acquittal

was that it impeached James in the court of public opinion. There can

have been few people who did not know of the trial, or find them-

selves taking sides – for King or Church. Whatever the euphoria of

the moment of the acquittal, constitutional resistance to James had

reached its limits, and executive authority remained in the hands of

the King with his agenda largely unaffected.

The Reaction

139

The stiffened resolve

Alfred Havighurst claimed that ‘by implication they [the Jury] ruled

against the legality of the suspending power as exercised by James in

the Declaration of Indulgence’. He also argued that none of the judges

in the trial of the seven bishops asserted the legality of the suspending

power – the abrogation of a law generally – they asserted that the

King might dispense with the law in certain specific cases. This was

the distinction reflected in the Hales judgement. While the difference

in legal terms is significant, in political terms it was a distinction lost

on the jury and the public, and, during the trial, the terms were used

interchangeably. Havighurst suggested that the pressure of public

opinion swung the trial: ‘in terms of popular pressure hardly any other

trial in the seventeenth century is comparable’. During the trial, the

public applauded arguments for the bishops and scorning those for

the crown.

W. L. Sachse concluded that the acquittal was a verdict

against James’s whole system of government.

The lawyers at the trial

had, in defending the bishops, developed general arguments against

James which would be used later in the Revolution.

Whatever the legal implications of the acquittal, Tim Harris has

argued that it is wrong to see the expressions of support for the bishops

as the same as endorsement of the Whig exclusionists’ desire to be rid of

James. Many of the supporters of the bishops, and a number of the bish-

ops themselves, remained the traditional Tory Anglican adherents, who

had supported James and the Stuart cause. Moreover, the leaders of the

seven bishops had been well-known for their opposition to Dissent, and

this may also have played a part in the expressions of support. Certainly

the disturbances attendant on the trial were directed at the houses