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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.