Abstract
On 16 October 1706, a hackney coachman of Coal Yard near Drury Lane reported that he had heard John Baldwin assert that the Pretender was the true son of James II. When he was challenged on James’s imprisonment of the seven bishops in the Tower, Baldwin replied ‘Damn the Bishops’.1 Thus eighteen years after they had been imprisoned and tried, the seven bishops, and their role in the overthrow of James II, were alive in the minds and lore of the working people of London. For men and women of the early eighteenth century, Catholicism and France represented twin evils, from which the events of 1688 had saved them. Only a year before Baldwin’s misbehaviour, a broadsheet entitled Great and Good News to the Church of England calculated that Anglicans outnumbered Catholics and Dissenters by 102 to 1, and included the text of the seven bishops’ speech to James when they presented their petition to him. The broadsheet also pointed out that the days on which the bishops had been imprisoned and released had particularly appropriate — and therefore apparently providential — readings from the Book of Common Prayer.2
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Notes
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© 2009 William Gibson
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Gibson, W. (2009). Introduction: The Seven Bishops and the Glorious Revolution. In: James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233782_1
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