His Majesties Declaration Defended

Into this atmosphere charged with suspicion was interjected the Popish Plot, said by Titus Oates and his fellow perjurers to be designed to murder Charles II and place James on the throne. From September 1678, when Oates began his series of revelations until the end of March 1681, when the King dissolved at Oxford the third Parliament elected under the Protestant furore excited by the Plot, Shaftesbury and his followers had the upper hand. The King was obliged to propose concessions to the popular will and to offer to agree to limitations on the authority of a popish successor. But Shaftesbury was bent on passing the Exclusion Bill, which excluded James from the throne and substituted the King's illegitimate son, Monmouth. Here he made a fatal blunder because he alienated churchmen who believed in the divine right of kings, all whose sense of decency was outraged by the prospect of a bastard's elevation to the throne, and the supporters of William of Orange, husband of Mary, the elder daughter of James, and the great opponent of Louis XIV. Also, when it became obvious that the King would not agree to a change in the succession, many feared another civil war with all its attendant dangers of a second military domination. Moreover, the lies of Oates and his imitators were becoming discredited.

Though a reaction against the Whigs was beginning, propaganda was needed to disabuse the public of two anxieties--that there was still a danger that Roman Catholicism might be restored and that the three dissolutions might foreshadow a return to unparliamentary government such as Charles I had established from 1629 to 1640, also after three dissolutions. The royal party was at first on the defensive. Their propaganda began with a proclamation issued on April 8 and ordered to be read in all churches. In the proclamation the King posed as the champion of law and order against a disloyal faction trying to overthrow the constitution. It was read in churches on April 17 and, according to Luttrell's _Brief Historical Relation_ (I, 77), "in many places was not very pleasing, but afforded matter of sport to some persons." Among several replies was one entitled _A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend_. Clearly there was need to answer this pamphlet and to state more fully the case against the Whigs. This task was undertaken by two of the greatest writers of English prose--George Savile, then Earl, later Marquis of Halifax, and John Dryden. Halifax, in the tract lately identified as his by Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge, 1940), _Observations upon a late Libel_--though he might scarify an individual opponent like Shaftesbury or pour ridicule upon a sentence from _A Letter_, set himself the task of answering the Whig case as a whole. The text he dilated upon was: "there seemeth to be no other Rule allowed by one sort of Men, than that they cannot Err, and the King cannot be in the Right." With superb irony and wit he demonstrated how inconsistent such an attitude was with the constitution of that day.

Dryden's tract, _His Majesties Declaration Defended_ is, like the one he is answering, in the form of a letter to a friend who has asked the writer's opinion of the _Declaration_ and the answer to it. "I shall obey you the more willingly," Dryden responds, "because I know you are a lover of the Peace and Quietness of your Country; which the Author of this seditious Pamphlet, is endeavouring to disturb." He writes to show the "goodness and equity" of the Prince, because once they are understood, the faction will lose its power and the well-meaning but misled crowd will be no longer deceived by "the specious names of Religion and Liberty." After these introductory paragraphs Dryden began to reply to the pamphlet point by point. His method is to quote or, more strictly, partly to quote and partly to paraphrase, a sentence and then refute its argument. In so doing he is following the method of the author of _A Letter_. Accordingly, to understand and judge the fairness of Dryden's refutation, it is well first to read _His Majesties Declaration_, then _A Letter_, and finally Dryden. The first has not been reprinted in full but a substantial extract may be found in Echard's _History of England_ (III, 624-6) and in Arthur Bryant's _The Letters of Charles II_ (pp. 319-22), the second is available in a not uncommon folio, _State Tracts: being a Collection of several Treatises ... privately printed in the Reign of K. Charles II_ (1689), and the third is here reproduced for the first time. After the perusal of these three tracts, the student may well turn to _Absalom and Achitophel_, and find instruction in comparing the prose and the verse. He may reach the conclusion that while both were written to win converts to the royal cause, the first was designed to weaken the Whig party and the second to take advantage of a tide that had turned to ruin the Whig leaders. (For a fuller discussion of the relationship of Dryden's tract and his poem see the writer's article, "The Conclusion of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel" in the _Huntington Library Quarterly_, X (1946-7), 69-82.) In addition to its historical interest Dryden's tract is a fine specimen of his masculine, vigorous style so well suited to controversial writing.