Resisting James II

Almost from the beginning of James II's reign, Anglican churchmen and their lay followers engaged in extensive and concerted civil disobedience, and did so with the manifest aim of bringing his regime to a standstill. When the king sought the gentry's acquiescence in opening public office to Catholics, two-thirds of them baulked. When he ordered the clergy to desist from preaching against his religion, they responded with volleys of sermons and pamphlets on the evils of popery. When he imposed upon the universities, the dons withstood him. When he sought addresses of thanks for his Declaration of Indulgence, he met with massive refusals. And when he demanded that the Declaration be read from every pulpit, practically all the clergy disobeyed, and the Seven Bishops who published their reasons stood trial for seditious libel. By the winter of 1688 James had been deserted, in spirit or in fact, by nearly all of the natural allies of Stuart monarchy. And by the following summer nearly all the Tories, lay and clerical, had come to terms with a dynastic change that earlier they would have pronounced abhorrent.

How a clerical and gentry elite which, in the shadow of civil war and Whig rebellion, had become so deeply committed to ‘divine right’ principles, came now to engage in systematic resistance has long been a central conundrum of the Revolution. This apparent apostasy from the vaunted doctrine of ‘passive obedience and non-resistance’ has forcefully struck almost everybody: the king and his apologists, contemporary Whigs, and generations of historians. James exploded with rage when he interviewed the Seven Bishops and, earlier, the disobedient fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford: ‘this is the standard of rebellion’; ‘is this your Church of England loyalty?’ John Dryden, in his poetical allegory in defence of James, The Hind and the Panther, has the lines: ‘The Master of the Farm [was] displeas’d to find / So much of Rancour in so mild a kind, / The Passive Church had struck the foremost blow.’ The Whigs’ contemptuous judgement is well captured in John Asgill's remark, years later: ‘I remember the latter end of the reign of King Charles II, when the pulpits blowed out their anathemas against all that doubted their jus divinum, or scrupled their passive obedience. After that, I don't forget the reign of the late King James, when this breath was sucked in again.’