The Duke of Monmouth

Life and Rebellion

Laura Brennan

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473894365
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

He was the illegitimate son of a king, a gallant and brave military hero, charming, handsome and well loved both within the court and with women; James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, had the life many would have envied in the seventeenth century.Monmouth lived in an age that was on the cusp of modernity. He lived through some of the biggest events and scandals of seventeenth century British history, including: the Restoration of his father, King Charles II; The Great Fire of London in 1666 and the last great plague to sweep through London killing thousands.James also experienced the political scandal of the Popish Plot; became embroiled in the foiled Rye House Plot, and was at the centre of the Exclusion Crisis, which was a major catalyst for the modern creation of our party political system.But what would turn the beloved darling of the Restoration court into a leading rebel?

Chapter 1

Why the King Lost his Head

Although Monmouth had not even been born at the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642, they are important to his story as their aftermath still affected the political, religious and social environments during the Restoration, and as a consequence, therefore, his eventual fate. Key themes that are at the root of the causes of the English Civil Wars were the fear of autocratic rule of a monarch and the dogma of the Divine Rights of Kings, as well as fear of Catholic influence of the monarch and the potential conversion of the nation back to Roman Catholicism.

The climax of the Civil Wars resulted in the execution of Charles I. After the regicide, Britain was then governed by a parliamentary republic that became known as the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth was overseen by Oliver Cromwell, under the title of Lord Protector.

Under the Commonwealth, Cromwell and his government were mainly made up of men who were Puritan Protestants and as a result, the Church of England became suppressed during what we now know as the Interregnum years (a de facto republic with puritan morals that formed the backbone of everyday life, as well as national politics). This meant that at the Restoration in 1660, the Anglican Bishops and the beginnings of the Court party would ensure that the nonconformist Protestants, such as Puritans, were suppressed. Catholics were also singled out and the result was that fear of both Catholics and non-reformists was common. These fears meant that Monmouth was seen as a good Anglican Protestant and thus a practical possible alternative to his Catholic uncle, James, Duke of York.

The English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century were unlike the previous periods of civil unrest and conflict, such as the struggle for the throne between Matilda and Stephen in the thirteenth century, or the infamous and bitter battles between the two royal Plantagenet houses; the red rose of Lancaster and their rival, the white rose of York, which have become known to history as the Wars of the Roses. The conflicting ideas were centred around how the monarch and parliament were going to rule the nations of England, Ireland and Scotland together, rather than who should govern the nations. At the time, Wales was a principality of England (as indeed it is still), and Ireland was considered to fall under the crown of England. Scotland had only united with England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. When Elizabeth died, the new king, James I, had been King James VI of Scotland since 1567, but now the two rival nations were finally united by a single monarch, although the union was not formalised in law until the reign of Queen Anne in 1707. The contentious issues of how a monarch and parliament should govern continued after the fall of the Commonwealth and into the reign of Charles II. These unresolved issues would affect all of the political, social and religious squabbles and hang ups that followed.

It is incorrect to refer to the period of 1642-1651 as the English Civil War, as during this time there were three separate conflicts fought between two sides; the crown and parliament. These conflicts were also fought in England, Ireland and Scotland. So, referring to these conflicts collectively as the English Civil War (singular) in terms of conflict and nation is wrong and misleading. The first of these wars took place from 1642-1646, when Charles I clashed with his parliament. Two years of peace followed before once again, from 1648-1649, Charles found himself at loggerheads with his parliament. This ended with parliament winning the war and Charles losing the crown, and his head, in January 1649. The conflict would later resume in 1649 despite the king’s execution. This contention was between Charles II fighting for his father’s lost crown against the men (the Parliamentarians), who had killed his father on Whitehall. After chasing each other around the country, the war ended at the Battle of Worcester and Charles II fled to Europe for the duration of the Commonwealth of Britain under Cromwell.

Although Charles II wanted a religiously tolerant society, the Anglicans had become resentful of the oppression they had faced during the Commonwealth years. Following the Restoration, they sought to eliminate anyone they saw as a threat to their regained religious freedom, regardless of whether the threat came from a Protestant or Catholic. This goes some way to explain the religious and political objections towards the Catholic Duke of York as the potential heir to the throne.

Charles I was not the first monarch from the royal house of Stuart to have struggled with his parliament; he was just unlucky in his judgment. He failed to understand or learn how to manage and manipulate them successfully. When his father, James I, inherited the throne from Elizabeth, he had already been King of Scotland for thirty-six years. As Elizabeth had rarely called her parliament during her reign, James’ parliament had different hopes when he replaced her as king. James had managed to tame the Scottish parliament in 1583 and was not prepared to be dominated by the bigger legislative body in Westminster. He fully believed that he was put on the throne to rule by God’s good grace and that he had a divine right to be king. Just like his son and grandson after him, James I managed his parliament by dissolving it when he was unhappy with the way that they attempted to control him. And just as in the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, the crux of this power held by parliament was money. They held the power to control funds for the royal coffers through taxation legislation. James I’s reign also haunted that of his grandson Charles II. This was because it was during the early part of James’ rule that the group of Catholic fundamentalists involved in the Gunpowder Plot tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and eliminate the new Scottish Protestant monarch and the whole of his Protestant ruling class. This historical event was used to fuel the public’s fear of Catholicism during the Restoration.

Charles I therefore had no template to show him how to be a king. He merely followed the example set by his father, as well as inheriting his father’s belief in the Divine Rights of Kings and bitterly resenting parliament for keeping him on a short leash, financially. His relationship with his Protestant government was probably not helped by his choice of a Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. The queen consort was the daughter of Marie de’ Medici, famous throughout Europe as a powerful and influential regent to her son, Louis XIII of France. Henrietta Maria would have been seen as a dangerous influence upon the king as she would have seen firsthand the power and success of an absolutist monarchy in France. As the daughter of a Medici, she certainly had a fierce Italian temperament and expressed strong opinions with her children and her husband on both issues of state and religion. Charles’ marriage to Henrietta Maria would have also caused parliament concern because they would have disliked England being joined in marriage to her old rival, France.

One of the main causes of the Civil Wars was because Charles I refused to call parliament for eleven years from 1629 until 1640. This was because he was so frustrated by their attempts to control him. As they held the purse strings to the royal treasury, Charles was required to find ways to cut his costs and to economise. One of the ways he did this was by ending British involvement in the Thirty Years War with Catholic European rivals Spain and France. War was expensive and no doubt this would have pleased his French wife Henrietta Maria as well. By pulling out of the war, Charles was abandoning fellow Protestant nations, Denmark and the Dutch Republic, and this would also have made Parliament nervous.

Charles also made himself unpopular among his subjects by trying to impose a ship tax upon counties with no coastline. The reason Charles asked his inland subjects to pay this additional tax was to help pay for the upkeep of the Royal Navy’s defence of the whole nation. Technically, Charles had found a law that had been allowed to lapse over the decades and all he tried to do was reinforce it, for his own benefit, without any parliamentary backing. The lack of parliamentary support led to some subjects refusing to pay this re-imposed tax. Refusal to pay resulted with the non-payers being brought before a court, where they were fined for their trouble as well as taxed. Charles did not win friends or support from his subjects through this endeavour and he was still no better off for his attempt.

Anglican Protestantism, adopted by the church within England after the Reformation under King Henry VIII, was always closer in practice to the traditional Catholic mass than any of the other more extreme forms of Protestantism, such as Lutheranism. Due to the fact that Charles I had ruled without the intervention of parliament, this came to be viewed by some to have brought the Anglican communion closer to absolutist monarchy and by association, Roman Catholicism. The king also changed the Anglican services with the help and encouragement from the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, further causing worry and fear that Charles was trying to reconvert England back to Rome. Once again, these fears and their after effects were still being felt well into the reign of his son. At the Restoration there were men serving in parliament who had lived through the Civil Wars and Commonwealth period and felt they had a just cause to fear a Catholic king inheriting the throne.

Charles’ attempt to press religious reform in Scotland would bring about his political downfall. Scotland had a more episcopal form of Protestantism, meaning that their church, also known as the Kirk, was overseen by bishoprics rather than the monarch, as is still the case today. Charles desired that all his kingdoms within Britain should follow a new High Anglican version of the Common Book of Prayer during their masses. Scotland, however, was resistant to this change in doctrine. The Scottish Reformation had happened when both England and Scotland had separate monarchies. The Scottish church’s form of Protestantism was always more akin to northern European reformist Protestants, rather than the ‘softer’ Anglican communion. Charles I was effectively trying to reform their church again and understandably, they resisted. This resistance reached breaking point in Edinburgh, when resistance turned into violence outside St Giles’ Cathedral in the summer of 1638.

The unrest that started outside St Giles’ spread throughout Scotland in protest to these new doctrinal changes. Eventually, in early 1639, Charles went to Scotland in the hope of repressing the violence. While he was there, the two sides came to an agreement known as the Pacification of Berwick. However, the peace brokered through the treaty did not last long, as just over a year later, in the summertime of 1640, fresh riots broke out. This time Charles was beaten by the Scots who came over the border and occupied Newcastle. To make things worse for Charles, he had to pay Scotland reparations to cover their war expenses. This would break the royal treasury and due to his arrogance in trying to dominate the Scottish Church, Charles found himself forced to recall parliament for the first time in eleven years.

This parliament has become known as the ‘Short Parliament’. His motive for recalling it was to obtain more money to fund another campaign in Scotland. However, the members of parliament, after being silenced for so long, were not just going to give the king what he wanted. The majority of the House of Commons, led by John Pym (political parties were yet to be established), decided to use this time not to discuss Scotland, but to make plain their unhappiness towards the behaviour of Charles himself. Charles took this as an act of lèse-majesté, literally seeing it as a criminal act against himself as the monarch and as such, decided to dissolve parliament, despite not getting what he wanted from them. The parliamentary session had only lasted three weeks.

When you understand how Charles II’s father had behaved prior to and during the Civil Wars, it becomes quite understandable why many within parliament, after the Restoration, feared that Charles II may take after his father. This may have been why Charles attempted to create religious tolerance within the early part of his reign, and why he waited until his deathbed to convert to Catholicism, as it was associated with absolute rule.

Having failed to get support politically or financially from his parliament, Charles doggedly attacked Scotland again for not bending to his demand and adopting the new Anglican Book of Common Prayer. This rash and egotistical assault on Scotland meant that a large part of the north of England was invaded and held by the Scottish. For a man with so little capital, Charles found himself as the king of both Scotland and England paying for both the English and the Scottish armies while they were on English soil. On top of that cost, Charles was also paying a whopping £850 per day to keep the Scots from invading any further in to England.

In an attempt to try and resolve the situation with the Scots, the king recalled Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, from his post of Lord Deputy of Ireland. Strafford had used his diplomatic skills in Ireland and managed to generate tax from the Catholic gentry by promising them religious toleration. Charles was hoping that he could also achieve this in Scotland with the Kirk. Unfortunately, not even the diplomatic charm of Strafford could resolve the hornets’ nest of trouble the king had provoked in Scotland.

Although Charles had dismissed parliament, he still consulted the House of Lords, which without the Commons is known as Magnum Concilium. The Lords, however, advised the reluctant king that he needed to recall a full parliament in this matter. If Charles had disliked his previous short-lived parliament, then he was not going to like his next one much either. This parliamentary session has, perhaps not unexpectedly, become known as the ‘Long Parliament’.

Charles called parliament with the intention of obtaining money to finish his war against the Scottish Kirk and its rebellious supporters. However, the Commons decided to launch the new parliamentary session by criticising Charles for his behaviour rather than helping him and were angry and frustrated at the fact that they had been neglected for so long. This parliament would become known as the ‘eleven year tyranny’, and was to be subsequently recalled and dismissed at Charles’ whim. Parliament resolved to change this by pushing through new laws that stated the parliamentary body should be called at least every three years and if the monarch failed to call his government, then they, the parliament, should still meet. This would become law in May 1641, with the passage of the Triennial Act. It became illegal for the monarch to raise taxes without their knowledge or consent and another safeguard ensured that he was forced to recall parliament frequently. This change in the law explains why Charles II had to find money through other means to allow himself not to have to recall parliament at the end of his reign.

Parliament then proceeded to punish Charles in the cruelest way possible; by attacking one of his biggest allies, the Earl of Strafford. Strafford had helped Charles to be independent of parliament, as he had raised taxes in Ireland so that Charles was less reliant upon them. Strafford consequently found his loyalty to the king rewarded by facing capital charges of High Treason. A Bill of Attainder was created, meaning that no evidence was needed to justify his guilt, only the agreement of the king, without Strafford having to undergo a trial for his alleged crimes. Charles struggled to follow through parliament’s Act of Attainder, because Strafford had only ever been loyal and obedient to him. The Lords, of whom Strafford was one, of course, felt compelled to pass and comply with the Attainder after the Commons voted in April 1641, with 204 in favour of his guilt. Only 59 MPs voted against, while 250 cowardly abstained from voting altogether. Charles eventually signed Strafford’s death warrant in May 1641, but only after Strafford himself wrote to the king asking him to sign it. On 12 May he was beheaded.

With the execution of the Earl of Strafford, both the crown and parliament were hoping to have resolved many of the differences between them and avoid the slide into civil conflict. However, Charles’ resentment and animosity towards his parliament grew, while the Commons’ suspicion of the king increased as they feared he would impose High Anglican Protestantism on the whole nation, with no consideration for other denominations. They also feared that Charles would use the army to enforce his will. This uneasiness would cause the Irish Catholics to fear for their religious freedom to practise their faith, and for Ireland to slip into unrest.

Charles knew he had lost his parliament in January 1642 when the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall said, ‘May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see or tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am.’ In saying this, Lenthall was declaring that he was parliament’s man now, and he was ruled by them, rather than the king. Civil war at this point was only a matter of time.

In terms of religion, Republicans were either Presbyterian or Independent Protestants, the most common form of which was Puritanism. The Republicans all had a political desire to see that England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were governed under a parliamentary system, instead of under the rule of a monarch. Many would have been happy to have a constitutional monarchy like we have today, with parliament and the monarch working together. Leading Parliamentarians who sought to work with the monarchy rather than abolish it were Thomas Fairfax; Edward Montague, 2nd Earl of Manchester; and Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex1. In the cases of Manchester and Essex, both men were part of the aristocracy and may have feared what would have happened to them if the crown fell. Therefore, it was better for them to have a monarchy that parliament could work alongside.

Probably the most prominent and well known Parliamentarian was Oliver Cromwell, who would go on to become the Lord Protector during the Commonwealth. Cromwell would be king in all but name and he even lived in former royal households such as Hampton Court Palace. No political provision was made for what would happen upon the Lord Protector’s death and subsequently Richard Cromwell inherited the role following his father’s death, just as the crown is inherited in a monarchy.

Within the Parliamentarian movement were other smaller factions with their own agendas, political beliefs and religious preferences. These included the groups known as Levellers and Diggers.

The Levellers believed in Popular Sovereignty, the belief that the populace should choose their rulers (both monarch and parliament), that there should be universal suffrage, equality before the law of the land and that there should be religious freedom and tolerance. Many of these ideas are seen as basic human rights in the twenty-first century, however, in the early seventeenth century they were seen as radical and dangerous, both politically and socially. People had their places within society and such ideas would allow people to be all the same, regardless of what their place was in the social structure, their gender or religious background. All of these parameters had previously kept society in check. The perceived leaders of the Levellers were John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn.

Diggers were more extreme in their political beliefs. They were politically socialist and verging on communist in their political dogma. They believed that land did not belong to one lord, but to the people who worked it. The Diggers set up communities and farmed communally in Cobham, Surrey, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, and Iver, Buckinghamshire.

The Parliamentarians were therefore much harder to define politically. They were unhappy politically but were not united in their political and social goals. As a group, even after they won the Civil Wars, there were too...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why the King Lost his Head
• Chapter 2: Charles II: A Life in Exile and the Birth of a Son
• Chapter 3: Restoration Politics
• Chapter 4: The Religious Legacy of the English Reformation within the Restoration Court
• Chapter 5: The Private Life of a Public Duke
• Chapter 6: The Making of a Military Man
• Chapter 7: The Catholic Threat
• Chapter 8: The Popish Plot
• Chapter 9: Monmouth and the Exclusion Crisis
• Chapter 10: The Road to Treason
• Chapter 11: The Rye House Plot
• Chapter 12: The Beginning of the End
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Monmouth in 17th Century and Contemporary Literature
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• Plate section