ABSTRACT
Charles II, in the declaration he ordered to be read from the pulpits of all churches after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, recalled the horrors of the Civil War when ‘religion, liberty and property were all lost and gone, when the monarchy was shaken off, and could never be revived till that was restored’. So Charles and the Tories successfully smeared the Whigs with the taint of republicanism; moreover, the Whigs themselves by their extremist tactics lost the support of many of the propertied classes. In any case, with parliament dissolved the Whigs were stripped of their one chance of reviving support, by using their electoral organization, which had worked so effi ciently in the elections of 1679 and 1681. All this partly accounts for the ease with which Charles crushed the Whigs after 1681. He was also helped by the criminal law, which in the seventeenth century was weighted against defendants, especially those charged with treason and felony, who were allowed neither legal advice nor prior view of the charges and the list of witnesses against them. For opponents of the crown, the situation was made even more threatening by the dismissal of judges who resisted royal wishes. The trials and executions in 1681 of Edward Fitzharris, an informer used and then abandoned by the court, and of Stephen College, a Whig supporter, illustrate the usefulness to the crown, as well as the intrinsic unfairness, of the late seventeenth-century legal process. The earl of Shaftesbury, who was imprisoned in the Tower early in July 1681 on a charge of treason, only escaped execution because the grand jury that considered the charges against him at the end of November 1681 was nominated by two Whig sheriffs.
