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Exclusion Bill

The Exclusion Bill Crisis ran from 1678 through 1681 in the reign of  Charles II of

England. The Exclusion Bill sought to exclude the king's brother and heir presumptive,

James, Duke of York , from the throne of  England  because he was Roman Catholic. TheTories were opposed to this exclusion, while the "Country Party", who were soon to

 become known as the Whigs, supported it.

Engraving showing "A Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope" held in London on 17

 November 1680. The Whigs arranged to have effigies of the Pope, cardinals, friars, and

nuns  paraded through the streets of London and then burned in a large bonfire.

In 1673, when he refused to take the oath prescribed by the new Test Act, it became

 publicly known that the Duke of York was a Roman Catholic. His secretary, Edward

Colman, had been named by Titus Oates during the Popish Plot (1678) as a conspirator

to subvert the kingdom. Members of the Anglican English establishment could see that

in France a Catholic king was ruling in an absolutist way, and a movement gatheredstrength to avoid such a form of monarchy from developing in England, as many feared

it would if James were to succeed his brother  Charles, who had no legitimate children.

Sir Henry Capel summarized the general feeling of the country when he said in a

 parliamentary debate in the House of Commons of England on 27 April 1679:

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.[1] 

The occasion which brought these sentiments to a head was the impeachment ofThomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, as a scapegoat for a scandal by which Louis XIV 

 bought the neutrality of Charles's government with an outright bribe. Charles dissolved

the Cavalier Parliament, but the new Parliament which assembled on 6 March 1679 was

even more hostile to the king and to his unfortunate minister than the outgoing one had

 been, and Danby was committed to the Tower of London. 

On 15 May 1679, the supporters of  Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, 

introduced the Exclusion bill in the Commons with the intention of excluding James

from the succession to the throne. A fringe group there began to support the claim to the

throne of Charles's illegitimate  —  but Protestant  —  son, the Duke of Monmouth. As it

seemed likely that the bill would become law, Charles exercised his Royal prerogative 

to dissolve Parliament. Successive Parliaments attempted to pass such a bill, and were

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likewise dissolved. The "Petitioners", those who backed a series of petitions to Charles

to call Parliament together in order to complete the passage of the Exclusion Bill,

 became known as the Whigs, while the Court party, or the "Abhorrers" in the political

cant of the hour, meaning those who found the Exclusion Bill abhorrent, would develop

into the Tories.

Shaftesbury's party, beginning to be known as the Whigs, involved the whole country in

a mass movement, primarily by keeping alive the fears raised by the Popish Plot. Every

 November, on the anniversary of Elizabeth I's accession, they organised huge

 processions in London in which the Pope was burnt in effigy. The King's supporters (the

Tories) were able to muster their own  propaganda in the form of memories of the

tyrannical regime of the Commonwealth government of  Oliver Cromwell and its many

austerities. Despite two failed attempts to reestablish Parliament and pass the bill, the

King succeeded in labelling the Whigs as subversives and as closet nonconformists. By

1681, in the course of the Exclusion Bill Parliament, the mass movement had died

down, and the bill was defeated when it was sent to the House of Lords. 

Notes

1.  ↑ John Kenyon, The Popish Plot  (Phoenix Press, 2000), pp. 2 – 3.