The Exclusion Crisis and the Succession
A Childless King and a Catholic Heir
By the late 1670s the central political problem of Charles II’s reign was simple to state and impossible to solve: the king had no legitimate children, and the next in line was his openly Catholic brother. The hysteria of the Popish Plot turned that long-running anxiety into an emergency. The Earl of Shaftesbury and his allies in the House of Commons argued that Parliament had the right to alter the succession by statute and exclude James, Duke of York from the throne. Charles II disagreed.
The Three Exclusion Bills, 1679–1681
Three separate Parliaments tried to pass an Exclusion Bill. The first, in May 1679, passed its second reading in the Commons by 207 to 128 before Charles dissolved Parliament. A new election returned an even more anti-court House. The second Bill, late in 1680, passed the Commons but was thrown out by the Lords after a famous speech by the Earl of Halifax (a ‘trimmer’ who balanced the two sides). Charles called a third Parliament, deliberately moving it to royalist Oxford in March 1681; when the Commons reintroduced exclusion, he dissolved it after just one week.
Three Exclusion Bills (1679, 1680, 1681) tried to bar James from the throne. The first was lost to dissolution, the second to the House of Lords, and the third to the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament after only a week. Charles never summoned another Parliament.
Dissolving Parliament normally meant losing access to taxation. Charles could risk it because Louis XIV of France was secretly paying him a subsidy under a renewed agreement, and because the Crown’s finances had improved through the customs revenue from booming trade. Cash from France — about £385,000 between 1681 and 1685 — let Charles do without parliamentary supply for the rest of the reign. The choice to depend on Louis was politically risky but personally decisive.
Whigs and Tories: Two New Names
The Exclusion Crisis is the first time English politics divides cleanly into two named camps. Both names began as insults. Whig meant a Scottish cattle-thief, and was thrown at the exclusionists; Tory meant an Irish Catholic outlaw, and was thrown at the king’s defenders. Both stuck.
Whigs argued that Parliament had the right to settle the succession in order to keep England Protestant and to protect the law from an arbitrary king. They drew support from Dissenters, London merchants and many of the gentry. Tories defended hereditary right as a gift of God, refused to accept that any subject could legally bar a lawful heir, and rallied to the Anglican Church and the loyalty oaths of 1660–65. They drew support from country squires, cathedral clergy and the universities.
The Monmouth Alternative
Some Whigs, including Shaftesbury, hoped to replace James with the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s eldest illegitimate son. Monmouth was Protestant, popular, and a successful general at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge against Scottish Covenanters in 1679. He toured the country in 1680 to public cheers. But Charles refused absolutely to acknowledge any marriage to Monmouth’s mother, Lucy Walter, and would not legitimise him. Monmouth was effectively sidelined by 1681 and would later return to lead an unsuccessful rebellion in 1685.
Whig pamphlets, including Andrew Marvell’s anonymous ‘Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government’ (1677), painted exclusion as the only safeguard against tyranny. Tory replies, including Sir Robert Filmer’s ‘Patriarcha’ (published 1680, written earlier), argued that royal authority descended from Adam and could not be conditioned on religion. The same arguments would be answered after the reign by John Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (1689), drafted in part during the Exclusion years. These pamphlets show that the Crisis was a contest of ideas as well as a contest for power.
The Oxford Parliament and Tory Reaction
The dissolution of the Oxford Parliament on 28 March 1681 is the turning point. Charles read out a printed declaration justifying his action and had it sent to every parish church to be read after the sermon. Public opinion swung. Tory loyal addresses flooded in from the corporations. Shaftesbury was acquitted of treason in November 1681 by a London grand jury (London still had a Whig sheriff), but the political tide had turned. He fled to Holland in 1682 and died there. Charles ruled without Parliament for the remaining four years of his life.
The Exclusion Crisis produced the first English party division. Whigs argued Parliament could alter the succession to keep England Protestant; Tories defended hereditary right and the Anglican settlement. The labels were originally insults, and the same divide would resurface in 1688 and beyond.