454 Trial of the Seven Bishops

David Crowther (0:20)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The History of England, episode 454, Trial of the Seven Bishops.

Last time, we heard about the flowering of James' crusade to use his royal powers to liberate his fellow Catholics, and ensure that liberation was permanent for the few years that it would take for his misled subject to now return to Rome. He had to make sure along the way that everyone understood that his rights meant he was accountable only to God, and that therefore his subjects should just shush and get on with what he told them to. And in James's mind, it was all going swimmingly. The outcome was assured. In Ireland, his mate Ticonel was rocking the Catholic world. In 1687, James had issued declarations of indulgence in both Scotland and England and Wales. And despite a little bit of whining here and there, he was utterly confident he had nothing to worry about. OK, so he had had to change political tact just a little bit. He had had to ally with dissenters as well as Catholics to keep things moving along, and he had had to sideline his Tory Anglican supporters. But that was OK, because conversions would now start flooding in.

If Jimmy II and VII was writing this particular episode, the title would have been Episode 454, Britain Returns to the Path of Truth and Light, because God and I commanded it.

Now, you and I know better. The Saint Major on the throne was failing to see the mutinous mutterings of his Thomas, for it was, because James had been forced to take draconian action to get to this place. Along the way, he was racking up a massive debit in his political account, and although the bailiffs were not yet knocking on the door, they knew where he lived.

Now, I am rather conscious of having repeated Jimmy's actions a bit much, but in summary, to a greater or lesser extent, he had purged or was purging all of the major national and public institutions, the judiciary, local shire and town government, privy council. He had established an apparatus of commissions to carry out these purges, commission of the peace for the local magistracy, and a commission for the boroughs under a Catholic lawyer to purge town corporations. Where, in a disturbing echo of Louis' persecution of the Huguenot, sometimes troops were forcibly billeted on the towns who were slow to carry out the required purge. And then most notoriously, there was the ecclesiastical commission. Charles I and William Lord were applauding and whooping so much that the archangel Michael had been reluctantly forced to put them in the Chokey for an hour or two to restorm calm at there.

James was confirmed in this almost reckless self-confidence by his summer progress in August and September 1687, with William Penn at his side. He traveled from Portsmouth to the west to the southwest, even to the Midlands, and no one goes there. In Coventry, James wallowed in a big civic occasion. The locals were all out in force to see him go by, and guess what? Yep, you guessed it, there were bonfires. I am seriously thinking global warming started in the 16th century. They are mad for a good bonfire.

James' presence and a few meaningful royal hints elicited another three addresses of thanks for his indulgences.

James promoted his policy of toleration as he went. At Chester, he asked the assembled dignitaries to join with him in making a Magna Carta for conscience. He also promoted the divinity of monarchy as he went, using the Stuart brothers' favourite hobby of touching for the king's evil. In 1687 alone, he touched 14,000 people and sent them away with their gold touch coin. The whole tour, in his view, was a triumph, and he was utterly convinced that the people's joyful acclamation and dutiful acknowledgement seemed to be pledges of their compliance. Everything in James's mind was just both tickety and tickety-boo even. If he had been looking more carefully at the apple of his satisfaction, he might have worried that others thought everything was in fact tickety-poo. Of the 15 cities he visited, eight of them still refused to offer any address of thanks for the indulgences. In Oxford, Anthony Wood remarked, there was a complete absence of the normal cries of, Viva Rex. There were even some bad signs from his very own court. So in the middle of one of these touching ceremonies, he turned to his gentleman of the wardrobe and Colonel of Horse Guards, one John Churchill, and he happily asked him, what the watching people thought of these fine ceremonies. Churchill replied rather acidly, that they saw it as paving the way for Catholicism.