Free A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game by Jenny Uglow Page B

the usual help from Robert Moray, who talked over affairs with Charles in the privacy of his Whitehall laboratory, Lauderdale persuaded Charles, correctly, that Rothes himself had in fact provoked moderate dissenters into becoming hard-line rebels by his clampdown on conventicles. First he turned Charles against Archbishop Sharp, whom the King had never liked, then slowly undermined Rothes’s power. In September, since Charles, said Lauderdale, found it so hard ‘to say bleak things’, he had personally drafted the letter revoking Rothes’s appointment as commissioner. The leading noble in Scotland was now Lauderdale’s close friend the Earl of Tweeddale, and soon Lauderdale himself held the post of commissioner, which he had coveted for so long. 14
     
    With regard to nonconformity, of whatever kind, Charles was simply concerned to keep the peace as far as he could in all his three kingdoms, distinguishing conscientious religious dissent from republicanism and sedition. Thus in Ireland, Robartes and Berkeley were instructed to follow Ormond’s tolerant line, bolstering the strength of the Church of Ireland, encouraging Catholic clergy who supported the crown and reining in those who were difficult or obstructive. In Scotland, in 1669 (at the same time as he was attempting to suppress the more extreme dissenting meetings in England), Charles was asking Lauderdale to take a line of appeasement, while still urging that extremists should be ruthlessly weeded out. On 7 June Charles granted the ‘First Indulgence’, by which a long-discussed idea was finally put into practice, allowing moderate Scottish presbyterian ministers to be reappointed to their former parishes or to empty livings. When Archbishop Burnet and his followers objected, and sent an address to the king, Moray managed to slant their protest so that it looked like an attempt to force his arm. Charles, angry, ordered the Archbishop to resign. During this time, he told Moray, ‘in most pungent and unanswereable terms’, that he profoundly disliked the persecution of people for their religious beliefs. 15 His motivation was purely politcal.
    In England, Charles’s attempt at comprehension had been a tactic to impose his authority as Supreme Head of the Church, disciplining the bishops and disarming dissent. But after the failure of that effort, his policy was straightforward: woo the moderates and crush the extreme sects. There were inevitable confrontations, the most significant of these being with the Quakers, and their new spokesman William Penn. In Ireland, the young Penn had helped Ormond put down the Carrickfergus mutiny but while there he had been impressed by Quaker meetings at Cork, and had returned to London (to the alarm of his father Sir William and the disgust of Pepys) as a member of the Society of Friends. Trained as a lawyer, Penn was an eloquent spokesman and skilled polemicist. His uncompromising attitude was shown by the title page of Truth Exalted , in 1669, written, it declared, ‘By William Penn the Younger, whom Divine Love constrains in a holy attempt to trample on Egypt’s glory, not fearing the King’s wrath, having beheld the Majesty of him who is invisible’.
    In 1669 Penn also published a Quaker critique of the Restoration court and its culture in No Cross, No Crowne , and the following year he would make his first stand as a political activist when he defied the new Conventicle Act, writing The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience , addressed directly to Charles. When he and his colleague Richard Meade were tried for addressing a ‘tumultous assembly’ in Gracechurch Street, in court Penn defended his right to freedom of religious conscience as the right of every English citizen. Both Penn and Meade were acquitted, setting a key precedent in English law. 16 Tumult followed. The angry Lord Mayor imprisoned the jury, who were then released by the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir John Vaughan, establishing yet