Exclusion Crisis
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The Exclusion Crisis ran from 1679 until 1681 in the reign of King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland. Three Exclusion Bills sought to exclude the King's brother and heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland because he was a Roman Catholic. None became law. Two new parties formed. The Tories were opposed to this exclusion, while the "Country Party", who were soon to be called the Whigs, supported it. While the matter of James's exclusion was not decided in Parliament during Charles's reign, it would come to a head only three years after James took the throne, when he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Finally, the Act of Settlement 1701 decided definitively that Roman Catholics were to be excluded from the English, Scottish, and Irish thrones, later the British throne.
Background
In 1673, when the Duke of York refused to take the oath prescribed by the new
In 1678, during the
From popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary power... Formerly the crown of Spain, and now France, supports this root of popery amongst us; but lay popery flat, and there's an end of arbitrary government and power. It is a mere chimera, or notion, without popery.[2]
Crises
The impeachment of Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, for use as a scapegoat for a scandal by which Louis XIV bought the neutrality of Charles's government with an outright bribe, caused anti-Catholic sentiments in parliament to boil over, resulting in a parliamentary push to exclude James from the throne. Though Danby had, for many years, been using his power as Lord Treasurer to attempt to divert the King away from a pro-France foreign policy, his effort to gain funds for the crown achieved the opposite, while bringing the ire of the parliament down upon him. In late 1677, Danby persuaded Charles to raise an army to threaten the French into paying them off to avoid an English incursion into the Franco-Dutch War. However, when news of the French victory against the Dutch at Ghent reached the Commons in February 1678, a motion was passed to address the King for an immediate war with France, despite the fact that parliament had granted no supply and had stopped the lucrative trade across the Channel. All too aware that the King lacked sufficient funds, Danby was forced into accepting a secret French proposal to give Charles money in return for an alliance. The letters confirming the secret proposal acceptance were later captured by other MPs who, upon revelation to parliament in late summer 1678, voted to impeach the Lord Treasurer on the charges that he had "encroached to himself regal power through his conduct of foreign affairs, that he had endeavored to introduce arbitrary power by raising an army on pretense of a war, and that he was 'popishly affected' and had concealed the plot." Over the following months Danby tried to retain his position, even getting Charles to save him from a trial in the House of Lords by dissolving the Cavalier Parliament. Worked up by the Popish Plot however, the newly assembled Habeas Corpus Parliament was actually much more hostile to the king and Danby, eventually banning him from entering the royal presence. On 6 March 1679, it committed Danby to the Tower of London.[3]
On 15 May 1679, the supporters of
End of the Crisis
While it should be treated with caution, the Exclusion Crisis is often identified as the point at which discernible political parties first emerged in England. Those who supported petitions asking Charles to recall Parliament and complete the passage of the Exclusion Bill were known as 'Petitioners' and later became
The nature of politics in this period is illustrated by the fact that Shaftesbury, who opposed James due to his similarities to the absolutist Catholic French regime, was supported financially by
One long-lasting result of the crisis was the codification of the writ of
In fiction
Robert Neill's 1972 historical novel The Golden Days depicts the Exclusion Crisis as experienced by two Members of Parliament representing a rural constituency. Sir Harry Burnaby is a staunch Royalist who had been knighted for having helped Charles II's Restoration; his neighbour and fellow MP is Richard Gibson, an ex-Colonel in Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army, and an outspoken member of the Green Ribbon Club and of the emerging Whig party. Despite their sharp political differences, Burnaby and Gibson come to deeply respect each other, and they share the anxiety lest the unfolding crisis escalate beyond control and England be plunged again into all-out civil war. Eventually, Burnaby's son marries Gibson's daughter, with the full blessing of both fathers.
See also
- Religion in the United Kingdom
- British monarchy
- Popery
- Popish Plot
Notes
- ISSN 0018-246X.
- ^ Kenyon, John (2000). The Popish Plot. Phoenix Press. pp. 2–3.
- ^ Knights, Mark. "Osborne, Thomas, First Duke of Leeds (1632–1712), Politician." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, October 4, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20884.
- ^ Harris, Timothy. "Cooper, Anthony Ashley, First Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683), Politician." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, December 9, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6208.
- ^ Edie, Carolyn Andervont. "Succession and Monarchy: The Controversy of 1679-1681." The American Historical Review 70, no. 2 (January 1965): 350–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/1845634.
- ^ Willman, Robert. "The Origins of 'Whig' and 'Tory' in English Political Language." The Historical Journal 17, no. 2 (June 1974): 247–64.
- ISBN 978-0521108379.
- ISBN 978-1843833055.
- ^ Edie, Carolyn Andervont. "Succession and Monarchy: The Controversy of 1679-1681." The American Historical Review 70, no. 2 (January 1965): 350–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/1845634.
- ^ Nutting, Helen A. "The Most Wholesome Law-- The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679." The American Historical Review 65, no. 3 (April 1960): 527–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/1849620.
Further reading
- Edie, Carolyn (1965). "Succession and Monarchy: The Controversy of 1679–1681". American Historical Review. 70 (2): 350–370. JSTOR 1845634.
- Furley, O. W. (1957). "The Whig Exclusionists: Pamphlet Literature in the Exclusion Campaign, 1679–1681". Cambridge Historical Journal. 13: 19–36. .
- Jones, J. R. (1961). The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–1683.
- Petrakos, Chris (2015). "'Those Times Can Tell The Story': The Anglican Reformation, Henry VIII's Succession Statutes, and England's Exclusion Crisis, 1679–1681". Anglican and Episcopal History. 84 (4): 393–415. JSTOR 43685165.
- Ronalds, Francis S. (1937). The Attempted Whig Revolution of 1678–81. University of Illinois Press.