Anti-French feeling and ethnicity among the khunnang and the people

The most straightforward way of understanding the affairs of 1688 is as a palace coup driven by elite factionalism. There were obvious reasons why most Siamese officials, or khunnang, would have cause to resent the accumulation of power and commercial dominance by both Narai and Phaulkon. Moreover, Phaulkon's increasingly feverish diplomacy threatened to bring French power into the heart of the state's affairs at a time when local rulers in the region were all too aware of the threat of European colonialism.Footnote ²⁴

The French deployment of the category of ‘mandarins’ is relatively unproblematic in identifying the khunnang as an interest group. The relationship of these officials with the king was indeed perennially tense in Ayutthaya.Footnote ²⁵ It was exacerbated by Narai's determination to keep his officials on a particularly tight leash and the deterioration of his temper in the 1680s.Footnote ²⁶ They also suffered from his unrelenting desire to fill royal coffers at the expense of other parties in the kingdom. It was not unusual for Siamese kings to seek to personally dominate trade but, in the 1680s, elite families saw Phaulkon developing a particularly ambitious and avaricious policy of royal monopolies hand in hand with European agents. This might well have appeared tantamount to a hijacking of the political and commercial functioning of the kingdom.Footnote ²⁷ Although Phaulkon refused the office of phra khlang out of a desire not to antagonize the khunnang, they were naturally antagonized nonetheless by his rapid accumulation of wealth.Footnote ²⁸

They had to watch the normally rigid protocol of the court bending to receive the arrogant envoys from Persia and Europe in 1685, while strutting French captains such as the Chevalier de Forbin were awarded with major military posts (he was made the governor of Bangkok) or flocked around the king during his hunting expeditions.Footnote ²⁹ One source claims that Phaulkon had tried to arrange Siamese girls to be supplied for the envoys’ enjoyment, which angered the Siamese officials who insisted that they should be provided by the Christian community instead.Footnote ³⁰

The bloody revolt of the Makassars in July–September 1686 was an unmistakable signal of factional unease and mounting resentment: it was led by a Makassarese prince who had taken refuge in Ayutthaya, but a group of khunnang were accused of being involved. The following year saw a further telling outbreak of violence. Phaulkon had stationed some Englishmen in Mergui to take control of trade. They much irritated the local khunnang, who then suspected a full-scale takeover when an East India Company frigate arrived in June 1687. The result was a sudden attack by Siamese and Burmese that left at least 60 dead and the expulsion of the English from the port.Footnote ³¹

It is not difficult then to imagine how the second French embassy, led by Simon de La Loubère and Claude Céberet de Boullay, would have been perceived when it arrived in September 1687 with its large contingent of soldiers under the command of General Desfarges and conveying the demand that they be stationed in Bangkok and Mergui. When this was brought to the king's council in late 1687, the khunnang were already primed to agree with Phetracha's representation of it as the spearhead of European imperialism.Footnote ³² (Indeed, he was correct, for the French had orders to resort to force of arms if their requests were not acceded to.) Phetracha gave a long speech relating ‘all the examples of princes of the Indies who, after having received the Portuguese and the Dutch had been despoiled of their estates and reduced to slavery’.Footnote ³³

Still, Narai agreed to the request. And subsequently it was not only high-ranking officials who had cause to be aggrieved by the French presence. Complaints emanated from Bangkok about the disturbances caused by the soldiers stationed there. They were making a nuisance of themselves in ways that exhibited a distinctly non-Buddhist loss of self-control: drunkenness, riotousness, and sexual harassment.Footnote ³⁴ In January 1688, the king of Johor wrote to Narai to warn against the policy of allowing foreign powers into one's kingdom. Later that month, a resident Malay was so bold as to inform the king that Phaulkon and the French were conspiring ‘against the service of the king, civic liberty and religion’ as the Jesuit Le Blanc reports it.Footnote ³⁵ He was tortured and Le Blanc claims he was thrown to the tigers.

In the early stages of the coup itself, Phetracha dwelled upon these fears of foreign dominion in his accusations of the French and Phaulkon.Footnote ³⁶ Once he was in control of the palace, he summoned General Desfarges from Bangkok to Lopburi, who now felt he had little option but to comply. When Desfarges arrived on 2 June, it is telling that Phetracha had him forced into the traditional position of prostration that the European envoys had refused to assume in their formal receptions with Narai. With a naked sword at his back to keep him on the ground, Desfarges was reproached for the poor discipline and violence of his men. As de Bèze notes, this was a risky move, because Phetracha still wished the French to withdraw rather than face them in open conflict. He was driven to it by the need to show those assembled at court that he was serious in his determination ‘to deliver them from the domination of the French, as he had promised’.Footnote ³⁷

All of this is relatively easy to comprehend without invoking broader expressions of ethnic identity and political community. Even if we conceive these frictions as drawing upon and generating a more generic antagonism towards foreigners, xenophobia may function as a negatively defined emotion (a rejection of x) rather than as the expression of a distinct in-group (belonging to y).Footnote ³⁸ For their part, the French sources, however, are clear that positive identities were invoked. Evidently, on this point, they must be handled with care. They deploy a language of patrie and political principle that may simply be treacherous in a Southeast Asian context.Footnote ³⁹ They may also be reading events through the lens of their own history, in which communal religious passions and suspicions of foreign involvement had helped to drive political conflict. And yet, it is important to note that, before 1688, French accounts were not inclined to impose categories of national sentiment and religious agitation on the Siamese; on the contrary, it was their absence that provoked comment.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is only in texts written after 1688 that such dynamics are emphasized and previous stereotypes of the Siamese upended in the process.Footnote ⁴¹ The French saw unusually affable cosmopolitanism morph into hatred, while the famous religious tolerance of the Siamese broke into a spasm of persecution.

In defence of his actions in 1688, General Desfarges commented that with hindsight the French should not have relied ‘on the gentleness of the Nature, on the esteem and affection of these Peoples for the French, since we saw them, on the contrary, full of hatred and fury for our ruin’.Footnote ⁴² What aroused such hatred? The engineer Verquains has it that ‘there were few among the two estates who did not allow themselves to be persuaded by [Phetracha's] speeches which had their foundation in religion and civic liberty [liberté publique]’.Footnote ⁴³ This finds an echo in Le Blanc's claim that, after the coup, ‘with the general consent of all the different Estates [Ordres], Phetracha was … soon after honoured with the titles of liberator of the Fatherland [Patrie] and defender of its Religion’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Le Blanc reports that one of Phaulkon's spies had recorded Phetracha saying: ‘I do not have the honour of being of Royal blood but I am of Royal milk and of a heart entirely Siamese, that was his expression.’Footnote ⁴⁵ And that Phetracha had once said to Phaulkon: ‘It's a shame Sir that you are not Siamese, for you would reign over us after the death of the King just as you govern us now, but the Siamese will want a man of their people [homme de la nation].’Footnote ⁴⁶

But what was the ‘nation’ or the ‘Fatherland’ whose liberty was at stake and who were the ‘Siamese people’ or ‘public’ who demanded one of their own as monarch? Scholarship has tended to see cosmopolitan Ayutthaya as an uncongenial environment for the development of proto-nationalism or politicized ethnicity.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, John S. F. Smith has recently presented a compelling account of how the Thai identity evolved over the early modern period.Footnote ⁴⁸ Smith observes that Ayutthaya's wars with its neighbours in the sixteenth century had ‘led to the growing association of loyalty to the Ayutthayan king with the Thai ethnic majority group’ as distinguished from Mon, Lao, and Khmer rivals.Footnote ⁴⁹ The word ‘Thai’ itself starts to appear in a few more sources during the seventeenth century. In the portion of the Palace Chronicle written early in Narai's reign, Ayutthaya is referred to as ‘krung thai’, or ‘the Thai capital’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The surviving extract of the diary by Kosa Pan, the ambassador to France in 1686, also indicates that the preferred self-descriptor was ‘Thai’ and this is confirmed by La Loubère, who also notes that Thai means ‘free’.Footnote ⁵¹

At the same time, however, from the early seventeenth century, ‘a revival of popular, court-sponsored Buddhism put an end to the ethnic tensions between the Thai, Mon, Lao, and Khmer ethnic communities’.Footnote ⁵² These now formed what Smith refers to as ‘the central communities’, being spatially and socially integrated with the Thai, and forming a kind of inner circle based on their cultural affinities as Theravada Buddhists.Footnote ⁵³ The performance of sacred kingship stood at the heart of this creation of political-cultural community.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, they were also increasingly liable to merge into the expanding Thai ethnic group. The French missionary Nicolas Gervaise noted that one-third of the kingdom were ‘foreigners’ insofar as they were descendants of prisoners of war from Laos and Pegu, but that they had merged so completely with the Siamese that it was difficult to tell them apart.Footnote ⁵⁵ These Buddhist groups were thus distinguished from various ‘peripheral communities’, mostly Muslim or Catholics, such as the Japanese, Persians, and Portuguese. These maintained greater cultural distinctiveness from the centre but were incorporated into the state order through the appointment of nai (community leaders).Footnote ⁵⁶ They were, in turn, distinct from the more transient foreign groups such as the Dutch and French who operated on their own terms.

Yet, just as both peripheral and foreign communities were being distanced in cultural terms, so they were acquiring greater influence in political terms through the logic of royal aggrandizement. Kings used these groups precisely because of their shallower local roots and their capacity to unlock the potential of the mercantilist opportunities of the early modern maritime world, rewarding them with privileges and ministries in order to curtail the pretensions of the local khunnang. This naturally intensified factional struggles over succession as different foreign groups fell in and out of favour in alliance with local khunnang families. But it also strained against the consolidation of an expanded Thai-Buddhist identity. Narai even allowed the performance of kingship, forming the centre of this mandala-like cultural order, to be influenced by foreign groups, at least in terms of the role of aesthetic glamour. Persian and French material culture—if not, crucially, religion—permeated the court.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is these tensions that were expressed in the Makassar revolt, the Mergui uprising, and then finally in the coup itself.Footnote ⁵⁸

Buddhist boundary-making

Some of the quotations above indicate that the French themselves intuited that religion lay at the heart of the self-conceptions driving the ordinary phrai who participated in the 1688 coup. Indeed, there are certain indications of defensiveness around the boundaries of Buddhism long before 1688. In the ‘picnic incident’ of December 1636, drunken Dutch misbehaviour in a temple had led to a major diplomatic incident.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the early 1660s, a Jesuit report refers to a small group of eight people who had converted in 1657 but were now ‘pointed at and called Christians, and the cross of Christ and the Christian way of thinking is considered stultitia gentibus’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The latter phrase refers to the ‘foolishness of the gentiles’ in disbelieving the teaching of the crucifixion (1 Corinthians 1: 23). In 1663, a decree was issued by Narai's court:

This ruling was to be observed on pain of death (although we do not know whether and when it was actually put into practice).Footnote ⁶² It is important to note that the decree does not express a generic anxiety about foreigners; it does not mention Khmers and Chinese, for example. Rather it refers to monotheists, to groups that were either Muslim or Christian.Footnote ⁶³ The decree conveys a clear concept of ‘heretical’ or damagingly mistaken views, which are referred to by the Pali terms for wrong thinking (micchādiṭṭhi) and suffering and woe (apāya dukkha), and are distinguished from right thinking (sammādiṭṭhi). Particularly intriguing is the direct conflation of sexual and religious purity. It may be that sexual relations are seen here as the first step of incorporation into monotheist households. Whatever the case, the decree identifies an ‘inner group’ of Theravada Buddhists, the Thai, Mon, and Lao, who require protection from a loss of their Buddhist commitment—from conversion. In this light, the much stricter decrees against Christian proselytization issued by Thai kings in 1731 (against preaching to or converting Thai, Mon, and Lao) and 1774 (against Thai and Mon converting) appear to stand in a longer lineage.Footnote ⁶⁴

Clearly, the widespread European tendency to marvel at the religious tolerance of Thai society obscures a much more complex story of how religious boundaries operated and intertwined with other group identities in late seventeenth-century Ayutthaya.

The intellectual neutralization of monotheism

It is probably no coincidence that the 1663 decree was passed the year after two MEP (Missions Étrangères de Paris) priests, Pierre Lambert de Lambert and Jacques de Bourges, had arrived in Ayutthaya. En route to the capital, in April 1662, the pair had encountered a monk in Tenasserim. Their account of the debate with the monk indicates that the political move against monotheistic proselytization glimpsed above was already part of a broader reaction that had a theological dimension too.Footnote ⁶⁵

Whatever the surface affability that missionaries routinely reported of Thai monks, they were evidently formulating an intellectual neutralization of Christianity in the period leading up to 1688. One key motif is the redundancy of Christianity, insofar as Buddhism had superior versions of what Christianity appeared to be aiming at.Footnote ⁶⁶ If Christian proselytizers were prone to brandishing the textual authority of the Bible, it was met by the monks’ own deep reverence for their foundational texts.Footnote ⁶⁷ As for soteriology, Guy Tachard noted that when challenged on the operation of karma and rebirth, ‘they scorn what is said to them of original sin and its effects, and they entertain visions of the disobedience and punishment of our first Father’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Karma also presented a more specific problem for the Christian story. Since Buddhism entirely rejected the notion of sacrifice or the scapegoat—that blood could somehow be exchanged for salvific merit—the suffering undertaken by Christ was not so much moving as puzzling.Footnote ⁶⁹ If Christ had truly been a good man, he surely would not have ended up the victim of such dreadful punishment. The cross was a thing of shame. La Loubère had to recommend that, in future, the teaching of the crucifixion should simply be avoided until the idea that one may be both unfortunate and innocent was somehow first established.Footnote ⁷⁰

The most important intellectual move made by the monks was already indicated in de Bourges's account. The monk attending to Lambert's discourse

This is the first mention we have of an innovative connection that was forged between Jesus Christ and Buddha's rival, his cousin and brother-in-law Devadatta. Devadatta was an important character in the Tipiṭaka (canonical texts), later commentaries, and the jātaka stories of the Buddha's past lives that formed the principal genre by which Buddhism was popularized.Footnote ⁷² His story functions as a morality tale on the evils of schism. In its broad outlines, Devadatta joins Gautama's following and thereby attains a degree of supernatural power (iddhi). He uses this to convert Prince Ajātasattu, who becomes his disciple. Emboldened by this success, it occurs to the young monk that he should become head of the sangha and so he challenges the Buddha for that role. Thus, he becomes the leader of a breakaway group of monks who try to assert their superiority by cleaving to a strenuously ascetic form of discipline. Devadatta comes to hate Buddha so much that he tries to kill him several times. This was only one iteration of a struggle between the ambitious monk and the Buddha that was repeated over many past lifetimes. He failed, of course, and was cast down to hell, where he remained suffering for his disastrous karma.

La Loubère began Book II of his Relation with a translation of a detailed life of Devadatta from the Pali, which he says was just given to him at the moment of his departure from Siam.Footnote ⁷³ La Loubère had been looking for a life of Buddha but could not find one (he had to rely on various oral testimonies) and this was evidently the closest he could get. It surely speaks to how central Devadatta had become to the religious encounter that he found such a text already assembled in Pali. His account retained the core of the canonical narrative while also echoing the jātakas and perhaps oral tradition.Footnote ⁷⁴ Other French visitors of the later 1680s also picked up on the theme.Footnote ⁷⁵

It is in Guy Tachard's Relation that we see just how far the Devadatta story could be refashioned in order to draw out the connection with Christ.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this particular telling, the story has become an origin myth for the division of the world into two religions: Buddhism and its false simulacrum. Only in this account is Devadatta shown failing to grasp the principle of karma, which explains how the missionaries (‘who have so much desire to debate’) could yet be so ignorant of this fundamental law or descend to allowing men to kill and eat animals.Footnote ⁷⁷ The original schism of Devadatta had begat more schisms, indeed seven of them, including the Protestant sects. And at the end, Devadatta was hung up on a cross, with a crown of thorns. This is a deviation from the typical image of Devadatta as being held in place in the deepest hell (Avici) by great iron spikes running through his body, as we see in La Loubère's version.Footnote ⁷⁸ That the Siamese equated Devadatta's punishment with Jesus's crucifixion is noted also by Choisy, Chaumont, and Gervaise.Footnote ⁷⁹ La Loubère gives us one further item used as evidence for the identification: that the name of Jesus's mother Mary was rather close to that of the mother of Buddha: Maya.Footnote ⁸⁰

The missionaries had themselves been inclined to pick up on such uncanny similarities and had their own assimilative narrative to explain them—tending to consider the religions of Asia as a gradual corruption of Christian truth.Footnote ⁸¹ But they seem not to have realized how much those similarities were being turned against them. Tachard is an exception:

Tachard notes that some monks had interrupted a theological discussion among the ambassador's party to assert that the core issue was the travails of Buddha while he was a monkey.Footnote ⁸³ This could be a reference to the Mahakapi Jataka (no. 407), in which the Buddha is a self-sacrificing monkey—teaching a king the virtue of compassion for his subjects, no less—suffering at the hands of selfish Devadatta.Footnote ⁸⁴

Monks’ references to the fraternal connection between Christ and Devadatta could seem benign to their missionary interlocutors, but this belied the fact that it amounted to a serious attack. Devadatta symbolized the spectre of schism, the ultimate expression of egotism, which the Theravada tradition had worked so hard to forestall. Devadatta was Buddha's archenemy, his would-be murderer. Whenever the discourse of Devadatta was deployed, it signified that Christianity had shifted from being merely an inferior form of soteriology to an actively dangerous one.

The discourse served to contain two threats sensed in Christianity: that of similitude and that of immanent power. Both were met by being devalued rather than denied. The Devadatta story deals with the question of ‘miracles’ in two ways. On one level, Devadatta is simply shown to be much less powerful than the Buddha in immanentist terms. Indeed, in the scriptural (Vinaya Pitaka) version, as soon as he develops his evil ambition, his supernatural powers desert him. And when he lets loose an elephant on the Buddha, the latter miraculously tames the beast.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Tachard's account too, Devadatta's lack of skill in such matters is put forward as an explanation for why the missionaries could not work prodigies (such as curing men, locating precious metals) in the way that monks could.Footnote ⁸⁶

On another level, the story conveys an ambiguity about the significance of miracles that derives from the transcendentalist dimension to Buddhist teachings. Elsewhere in the textual tradition, Buddha is critical of the recourse to miracles as a means of conversion.Footnote ⁸⁷ Note that Devadatta had attained his powers rather quickly and before making much progress towards nibbana. As La Loubère puts it, of the companions who joined with him, ‘he alone could obtain no other thing than a great strength and the power of doing miracles’.Footnote ⁸⁸ His short-lived powers may ‘work’ in terms of attracting the prince—but this is no reflection at all on the worth of his teachings. La Loubère inserts an extraordinary note to the text at this point: ‘the miracles of Jesus Christ persuade them that he is Tévatat, but it is necessary to make them see that the miracles which they attribute to Tévatat are to do evil and those of Jesus Christ are for good.’Footnote ⁸⁹ What does this local discourse amount to? A nullification of immanent power as means to effect conversion.Footnote ⁹⁰ Any such magic-working the missionaries could claim only demonstrated how badly they had gone awry.

In the context of the embassies of the 1680s, the story was surely particularly pointed. It turned, after all, on a moment of royal conversion. Devadatta uses his powers to draw Prince Ajātasattu, the heir to the throne of Magadha, towards a grievously mistaken corruption of the true law. This must have resonated at a time when Narai's inclinations to Christianity were the subject of rumour.

It was not until the mid-1680s, then, that the French began to pick up on the religious mobilization against them. It had been and was still hard for Christians to grasp hold of the sort of identity that Buddhism established, given that it did not take the form of an equivalent and antagonistic exercise in exclusivist faith. La Loubère attained the firmest grip. He appreciated that—in effect—the Indic religions were not predicated on exclusive belonging as a soteriological imperative, nor on some notion of loyalty to a jealous metaperson, nor on an esteem for ‘faith’, in the sense of an assertion in the face of doubt—but yet they remained mysteriously unshakeable nonetheless.Footnote ⁹¹

For Buddhism differed from many of the immanentist forms of ‘paganism’ that missionaries encountered elsewhere in the world insofar as it had originated as an ‘offensive’ religion, just like Christianity. It had emerged as one among several consciously defined rival philosophical-spiritual systems, which it claimed were inferior.Footnote ⁹² As La Loubère notes: ‘they do believe themselves more pure and virtuous than the Christians. They alone are creeng that is to say, pure and that the Christians are Cahat or destined to sin like the rest of mankind.’Footnote ⁹³

It is simply that Buddhism mounted its project of dominion in an entirely different way to monotheism. Tambiah notes the correlation between the political imagery of the cakkavatti who conquers kings but allows them to continue once they have submitted to his righteous overlordship, with the religious imagery of Buddhism subduing other systems but allowing them to persist in a subordinated form.Footnote ⁹⁴ It follows then that Buddhism would not spring into aggression at the mere presence of another belief system, but only when it was in danger of being dislodged from its hegemonic position.Footnote ⁹⁵ It was precisely this situation that arose in 1688.

The role of the sangha in the rebellion

From the start, Narai's reign had been characterized by serious clashes with the sangha including assassination attempts.Footnote ⁹⁶ A number of times, he had purged the sangha, thereby exhibiting his royal duty of maintaining its purity, of course, but also driving defrocked monks into corvée labour and beating down on potential opponents.Footnote ⁹⁷ The tension between rulership and clerisy typical of societies with established transcendentalist traditions was running high. Missionaries may have delighted in these antagonisms, but it was Phaulkon who understood properly how devastating they were to their designs. Closer to the inner workings of the Ayutthaya court than any other European, he also saw more clearly than any other foreigner how the legitimacy of the king depended upon his upholding Buddhism. If a ruler were to abandon this role, the moral authority of the sangha might translate into political opposition. Indeed, in secret documents sent to Versailles in 1685, Phaulkon laid out a plan for the use of subterfuge and military force in implanting Christianity. This amounted to a recognition that the only means of overcoming a massive legitimacy deficit created by the imposition of a Christian ruler would be through sheer coercion.Footnote ⁹⁸ He was therefore among those prompting the French to send troops to accompany the 1687 embassy.

Phaulkon's long letter to Louis XIV's confessor, François de la Chaise, provides strong evidence that the sangha were preparing the ground for a revolt.Footnote ⁹⁹ In February 1685, it emerged that a monk had prophesied that the king would die for being an enemy of religion. Then, in March or April 1686, a paper was found attached to a tree in front of the palace at Lopburi, which described ‘the peril in which the Siamese religion found itself. It invited the whole world to open their eyes to an affair that concerned public interest’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ From 1687, astrological predictions of a great change to affairs of state surfaced to further stir the febrile atmosphere.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In that year, Narai purged the sangha again, having several thousand monks ‘reduced to the secular condition’.Footnote ¹⁰² Around this time, a high-ranking monk of 80 had spoken out against the foreigners after an official was beheaded for offending a European officer: Narai had the impaled corpse of the official placed at the monk's door.Footnote ¹⁰³

All this had happened even though Narai had not in fact succumbed to the pressure exerted by the French embassy to convert. But when his illness worsened in February 1688, he was powerless to stop a rumour that he was about to become a Christian and destroy the Buddhist temples.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In his search for a pretext for usurping the crown, Phetracha charged Narai with the crime of even thinking about conversion, and claimed that the king had passed word to the Jesuits that he would convert.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This was the climax to rumours or fears about the king's favour for the new sect that had surfaced a number of times.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Phetracha had been laying the groundwork for this strategy for many years. He clothed himself with the garb of Buddhist piety, literally as well as metaphorically, for he wore an ochre-coloured robe that approximated that of a monk. In fact, this practice dated back to the year that he had spent in a monastery following the death of Narai's queen in 1680. He had made the most of his time in the wat, excelling as a monk and developing strong connections with the monastic hierarchy, and in particular the Sangkharat of Lopburi.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It was only against his protestations that he was levered out of the wat. This is the strategy that Shakespeare has the Duke of Gloucester deploy in order to become Richard III. By careful prearrangement, Buckingham and a crowd of citizens disturb Gloucester at prayer in between

Thus, Phetracha plays the part of the godly man dragged from higher contemplations and propelled to the throne by national need. And thus he sounded convincing when, in 1688, he claimed that his ambitions for his own person extended no further than the temple, and that his only objective was to preserve Buddhism. He was simply carrying out his duty to safeguard the monks from the attacks of a Christian successor.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This is the essence of righteous kingship.

Phetracha's alliance with the sangha bore fruit in more concrete and institutional terms. There was no other organizational structure that could rival the sangha in its penetration of all levels of society across the whole kingdom. It was something that men from all social ranks passed in and out of, and the monks daily did their rounds of alms-begging among the laity. Phetracha used the wats of Lopburi to assemble his supporters and, when the coup was finally triggered on 18 May, it was the Sangkharat of Lopburi, held up on the shoulders of those below, who broke the taboos around the palace by pushing open its doors.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The agency of ‘le peuple’

What of the people bearing him aloft; what of the crowd? I was here intrigued by a comment made by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit in their recently published history of Ayutthaya. Perhaps there has been a tendency to downplay the novelty of 1688 a little. Although it may bulk large in the French texts, from the perspective of Thai history, it can seem just one of a whole string of palace coups and usurpations. Baker and Pasuk, however, suggest that there were two new elements in 1688: the monkhood and the mob.Footnote ¹¹¹

However, this suggestion must be scrutinized in light of the possibility that the evocation of ‘le peuple’ in these events is merely a chimera of Eurocentric perception. The crowd that marched to the palace might merely testify instead to the hierarchical operation of Siamese society, in which the khunnang could mobilize large numbers of men through the royal labour system, personal retainership, and slavery.Footnote ¹¹² It is certainly true that 1688 indicates that the necessary reliance on khunnang for the orchestration of corvée labour placed a powerful weapon in their hands that could be turned against the king. Desfarges tells us that one of Phetracha's allies was the official who kept the registration records, which were used to summon phrai luang to the wats.Footnote ¹¹³ The personal retainers (phrai som), which the rebel khunnang had accumulated in large numbers, were also mobilized, as were those in debt bondage or ‘slaves’ (that).Footnote ¹¹⁴

There are, however, several reasons for concluding that there was a genuinely popular dimension to the mobilization that went beyond merely following orders.Footnote ¹¹⁵ First, according to Claude de Bèze, on the eve of the coup, the manpower available to Phetracha was deemed insufficient and this prompted Phetracha to turn to the hierarchs of Lopburi to stir up the people.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The implication is that the monkhood was used to mobilize sections of the population who could not be reached via normal patron–client relations or corvée mechanisms.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Second, we may note the sheer extent of the mobilization in social and territorial terms. It is useful to refer here to a Portuguese account by the Jesuit Francisco Nogueira, based in Japan, whose sources and biases were somewhat different to those of the French, but who also refers to ‘a general conspiracy among all the people’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The uprising took in the provinces, where monks had been deployed to garner support.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Tellingly, it operated even in areas where key positions were in the hands of supporters of Phaulkon and Narai, as with the governor of the city of Ayutthaya itself.Footnote ¹²⁰ Le Blanc records that the people of that city heard of events in Lopburi with joy, such that the governor could not dare ‘oppose the fatal torrent which swept everyone away’.Footnote ¹²¹ One missionary observed:

Third, our sources consistently emphasize the emotional arousal of the local population. For example, just after the arrest of Phaulkon, Phetracha had some French officers at Lopburi taken to Thale Chupson fearing that ‘the People, animated as they were against the foreigners’ would turn on them.Footnote ¹²³ But the French officers decided to make an escape. As part of their flight—and with shades of the picnic episode—they had taken over a barge of monks. The monks then proceeded to raise up ‘the people’ who came to avenge this outrage and clustered on the riverbanks.Footnote ¹²⁴ The officers ended up holed up in a wat; they were lured out and the ‘perfide populace’ attacked them.Footnote ¹²⁵ General Desfarges, whose son was one of these officers, reports that ‘[t]hey were then put on display in Louvo before a multitude of rascals for three hours, who spat in their faces and committed every imaginable outrage. This story … caused me to reflect on the extremity of our affairs given the extreme hatred the People showed towards us’.Footnote ¹²⁶

In the fort at Mergui meanwhile, Lieutenant de La Touche was betrayed by the Siamese soldiers placed under him. As he was walked under guard through the town, he claims that he was slapped and kicked by the crowd, who called out from all sides: ‘Hey! Here's another Frenchman! Take him away, crucify him!’ This last expression surely reflects the role of crucifixion in mustering intellectual and visceral opposition to Christianity.Footnote ¹²⁷

Fourth, there is some evidence that the ‘people’ had their own political sensibility and sense of legitimacy, which became clear when Phetracha had to reveal that he was not going to retire to the wat after all. He wanted to remove Narai's half-brothers from the succession, and so had them assassinated. Yet, needing to appear as a supporter of the existing dynasty, he made it seem as if the order for the princes’ deaths had been issued by Narai.Footnote ¹²⁸ Still, he could not avoid the sense that he had betrayed the princes, who had particular support in the city of Ayutthaya.Footnote ¹²⁹ And according to de Bèze, their execution on 25 July turned both the monks and the ‘people’ against Phetracha, seeing that his concern for the ‘public good’ merely masked his own ambition. They even briefly took up arms in Ayutthaya, but by then he had mastery of the military.Footnote ¹³⁰

There is a broader context in which one might situate this nascent popular agency. The shift to an increasingly commercialized economy in Siam rendered the existing system of corvée labour increasingly anachronistic insofar as it obstructed the emergence of a fluid labour market.Footnote ¹³¹ One consequence of this was that phrai began selling themselves into that status (‘slavery’) in order to both escape royal service and raise capital to start businesses, and increasing numbers of that then ran away in order to seek further opportunities.Footnote ¹³² A set of laws quickly passed by Phetracha in 1690 indicate a general anxiety about banditry and crime, and the need to claw back control over labour and the movements of the populace. More speculatively, an increasingly urbanized and entrepreneurial population might anyway be expected to display a greater sense of their own capacity to influence the political sphere.

1688 itself seems to have unleashed a new sense of possibility. Baker and Pasuk argue that, from this point on, people were more difficult to control and refer to a number of revolts in the aftermath.Footnote ¹³³ The Khorat governor refused to drink the water of allegiance and was supported by a local monk, and his town held out for three years. More serious was the rebellion of a Mon monk, Thammathian, who disguised himself as one of the murdered princes (Aphaithot), studied magic, and led a movement towards the capital. Ayutthaya was thus besieged by a randomly armed mass—an ‘undisciplined rabble’ according to Kaempfer, which is exactly how Le Blanc had described the rebels in 1688.Footnote ¹³⁴ These events in the aftermath of 1688 reinforce the sense that commoners might be emboldened to join in snowballing movements to besiege the capital on their own account rather than simply as creatures of the khunnang. They illustrate too the continuing political relevance of the sangha. Lastly, that these rebellions tended to raise up of contenders claiming to be related to Narai or even one of the dead princes is rather good evidence in support of de Bèze's contention that Phetracha's coup suffered a serious legitimacy crisis of its own as soon as it became clear that he intended to replace the princes.

The persecution of Christianity?

In the weeks after Phaulkon's arrest, Phetracha had most of the Christians in Lopburi and from wider afield rounded up and put into prison. Did this also reflect the arousal of popular religious antagonism? Once again, we must consider source criticism; in this case, the problem is the Christian paradigm of martyrdom, through which an experience of suffering is liable to be presented as persecution on the grounds of faith.Footnote ¹³⁵ Missionaries departed their homelands half-desiring a painful end. Hence Le Blanc rushes to compare the plight of the prisoners of Lopburi with the better-known martyrs of Omura in Japan.Footnote ¹³⁶

It is important then to establish whether the treatment of foreigners and Christians during the coup served political ends that the French sources, and particularly the Jesuits, misconceived. It is certainly true that in a later phase towards the end of the affair in October, the imprisonment of Frenchmen and missionaries seems to have been prompted by Phetracha's desire for a bargaining chip to play in his negotiations with the French over their departure and the fate of Phaulkon's wife.Footnote ¹³⁷ When the French sailed off in November, Bishop Laneau and the Christian community around him were arrested, in retaliation for the failure of the French to return two hostages.Footnote ¹³⁸

However, the following analysis concerns the imprisonment and ill-treatment of Christians in the first month or so. The chronology of events in this early phase indicates that it was not driven by the desire to create hostages—because Phetracha allowed most harassment of Christians when he least needed to influence French behaviour. In fact, at this point, his political interests were split: evidently he needed to ride a wave of popular anger in order to establish his domestic position, but he also needed to rein in such emotions so as not to weaken his foreign policy, for he did not want to precipitate a French reprisal. In the first two weeks of the coup, from 18 May to 1 June, Phetracha was particularly cautious because he could not yet predict the response of the French in Bangkok and had not yet secured his authority over Ayutthaya.Footnote ¹³⁹ In this period, several sources indicate that some or most of the Christians in Lopburi had been arrested nonetheless.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ To those Frenchmen, such as the Abbé de Lionne, whom Phetracha needed to use as go-betweens with Bangkok, it was explained that the arrests were merely due to ‘the fury of the Populace’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ However, once Desfarges had been lured out of Bangkok to visit Lopburi, Phetracha loosened the reins. At around 1 June, ‘all Christians were put in prison without any distinction of age, sex, or nationality’, according to de Bèze.Footnote ¹⁴² Once Desfarges had been received, told off, and dispatched, and once it was clear that he was not going to attempt to defend Phaulkon, the latter could finally be executed, on 5 June, which

Phaulkon, the protector of the Christians, was no more and ‘as the Christians were odious to everyone, no one feared reprisal for making them languish in prison’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As Phetracha's grip tightened, Christians across the kingdom were rounded up and dispatched to Lopburi.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

But how far can European references to a generic targeting of ‘Christians’ be sustained? A closer look at the particular groups who were placed into the ‘cangues’ or stocks of Lopburi is required. It must be noted, however, that the motivations behind these arrests were multiple and shifted over time according to overlapping factional, strategic, xenophobic, anti-Christian, and especially what I will describe as anti-conversion sensibilities, which all played their part. Moreover, our sources conflict at times, each writing from different experiences of these confusing events.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

It is immediately obvious, however, that this was not simply an anti-French movement. Indeed, some sources even suggest that the French in Lopburi were not in the first sweep of arrests.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The ‘Portuguese’ (containing many people of mixed race), on the other hand, evidently formed a significant number of those targeted from the first in Lopburi. Given that the coup was also directed against Phaulkon, who was a convert to Catholicism and had married a woman with a Portuguese background, it is possible that this entire community came under suspicion and subject to reprisal as his potential faction.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Certainly, his extended household were to be apprehended, as was the norm for fallen officials. But our sources are ambiguous as to how widely or deliberately the Portuguese were targeted.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It would seem that the Portuguese in Ayutthaya—who may have numbered circa 3,000—were forced to remain in their designated quarter on pain of death.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Nevertheless, the political threat emanating from the Portuguese, who were a relatively ‘tame’ presence in the Ayutthayan order by this time, must not be overstated.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Indeed, Phetracha recognized that he could use their help as a counterweight to the French and, when he called on them to assist him in the siege of Bangkok, they complied.Footnote ¹⁵² Moreover, to refer to the chronology outlined above, it was when the possibility of a cabal between Phaulkon and other Christians was dispelled and the French threat was contained that the general attack on Christianity occurred.Footnote ¹⁵³

It seems to have been essentially religious rather than ethnic identity per se that was at stake here. This is borne out by the case of an Armenian man who had married a Portuguese woman and become a Christian and was therefore imprisoned, while his brother, who was Muslim, was left alone.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Indeed, one source claims that the Portuguese and others were only swept up as part of a movement that was principally directed against the ‘native or naturalized Christians in the country’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The latter presumably refers to the Siamese and Peguan converts who figure prominently in the accounts of the early arrests—we shall return to the significance of this point.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ However, the range of Christian groups caught up in this move was broader still.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Strikingly, it included some English soldiers and girls who ‘although heretics, had been arrested as Christians’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ These soldiers may have been imagined to be in Phaulkon's service, and arrested on that score. Perhaps—it is speculation—the ‘Danish Huguenots’ who were rounded up alongside them also had some such role.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

The arrests in Lopburi therefore gathered in a surprisingly diverse array of Christian groups including Protestants as well as Catholics. However, it was not quite an indiscriminate targeting of all Christians. The Dutch were left alone, for obvious political reasons: antagonistic to the French, they may even have offered some kind of support to Phetracha.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ They were also regionally dangerous and Phetracha could clearly not afford to antagonize other maritime powers as well as the French and English. The other ethnic group that appears to have been left alone were the Japanese.Footnote ¹⁶¹ This fits with the fact that they had come to be defined more by their ethnic rather than their religious identity; it is most telling that they are not listed among the communities with false beliefs in the laws of Prasat Thong and Narai.Footnote ¹⁶² Importantly, neither the Dutch nor the Japanese were associated with proselytization.

There is one last group excluded from the arrests: the Jesuits were allowed a kind of liberty and even protection. This surely represents Phetracha's need to maintain diplomatic relations with France in the hope of staving off a reprisal—and his ability to control the scope of the arrests when it was imperative.Footnote ¹⁶³ Their special treatment puzzled the other Frenchmen and led to rumours that they had bribed the new ruler. Most likely, they were seen as a hotline to the French throne; this was Phaulkon's one concession to the play of ‘religious diplomacy’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

However, what needs emphasizing is that this official protection of the Jesuits had to be preserved in the face of popular anger towards them. Le Blanc's narrative is probably heightened by his desire to prove that the Jesuits had not enjoyed any surreptitious advantage and had their own share of suffering to bear.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Yet it is essentially plausible in its details of the Jesuits being pelted with stones, forced into prostration when they passed wats, and subject to the taunts of small children displaying the general hatred towards them.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Apparently,

Although the discussion thus far has suggested some possible strategic and political considerations—variable in their plausibility—that may explain why many of the groups were targeted, in order to make sense of all the evidence, we must also conceive of an expenditure of social energy aroused by the defence of Buddhism in the coup. Evidently, there was a flash of anger at the elite level: Beauchamp, one of the French officers arrested alongside Phaulkon in the palace, tells us that the Kromluang Yothathep (the ‘Princess-Queen’) had proclaimed loudly that ‘all the Christians in the kingdom should be exterminated’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As Bhawan Ruangsilp shows, Yothathep was an important presence at court who was seen as key to the succession and had clashed with Phaulkon in the past.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ But her outburst reflected a broader mood of antagonism towards Christians among the population at large, which found expression outside the towns of Ayutthaya and Lopburi—in Phitsanulok, to the north, for example, where a Franciscan and a lay priest were chased down by a huge number of men—and had been noted by missionaries at least four months before the coup.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

The Thai had long distinguished between different Christian and European groups on ethnic grounds and the court was aware of the antagonism between Protestants and Catholics and the scarcely less evident tensions between the MEP and the Jesuits. At the same time, we have already seen how an overarching concept taking in all the Christian groups was taking shape in the popular mind, centred on the figure of Devadatta and the associated symbol of the crucifix. This becomes evident if we consider not just who was targeted, but also the symbolic dimensions to how they were harassed. For example, bamboo crucifixes were used to beat down upon a young Frenchman, while a nun who taught women in the Portuguese camp in Ayutthaya was dragged up to Lopburi and a crucifix was tied to the soles of her feet.Footnote ¹⁷¹

That the Devadatta equation had moved out of the monasteries is borne out by a missionary report about songs sung in public against the crucified Christ-as-Devadatta. The Christians were accused of having ‘attempted the destruction of the religion of their country’. To be a Christian was to be a rascal as Devadatta was; you had ‘left your mothers’ breasts to take those of a tiger’.Footnote ¹⁷² Devadatta had not only committed a sin of cosmic, karmic proportions, after all; he had turned against his own, breaking the bonds of kinship as well as monastic accord.

However, it was primarily a rejection of Christianity as a proselytizing force that animated the rebels. They were not intent on wiping the kingdom clean of the religion. They were rather triggered by a desire to undermine the threat it was perceived to pose to the hegemonic position of Buddhism. It was, in that sense, shaped by an ‘anti-conversion’ sensibility. This helps to explain why it was ‘native or naturalized Christians’, which I take to be a reference to the Theravada ‘Central Communities’ of Thai, Mon, and Lao, who were targeted in the first actions. It also finds a most explicit materialization in Le Blanc's reports that, on 14 June and regularly thereafter, the prisoners were informed that they would be released if they would pray at the wats. He relates many examples of the threats and inducements offered to make the Christians apostatize—a kind of forced reconversion.Footnote ¹⁷³ Indeed, the missionaries report that some of the Siamese and Peguan Christians succumbed and renounced their faith.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ They did this under pressure of mockery and insults that indicate how religion was fused with ethnic or xenophobic discriminations, ‘being accused of leaving the religion of the country to embrace that of foreigners and Europeans’.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The numbers of Thai, Mon, and Lao who had converted were tiny and politically irrelevant.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ But they became a symbol of the threat to the Buddhist order that was in fact most concretely realized in the threat of the conversion of the king himself.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

This did not amount to the sudden acquisition of a monotheistic-style hostility to other faiths.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ After the French departed, it did not take too long for some monks to become friendly again with the few remaining missionaries in prison.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ And once the threat from Europeans was shown to be thoroughly extinguished and Phetracha had finally secured his position, they could be released, in April 1691. The missionaries were even allowed to set up their seminary again. At Laneau's funeral in 1696, the monks sent offerings to honour him.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Yet there are grounds for thinking that the arousal of an anti-conversion sensibility had produced a lasting change in how proselytizing monotheisms were viewed. The journal of Alexander Hamilton, who visited Ayutthaya in 1719, notes how minor transgressions of temple sanctity by non-Buddhists were liable to incur the wrath of a ‘zealous sanctified mob’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ One way to escape the prison of our European sources and consider how the presence and retreat of European influence was signified in the popular imagination is to consider a number of eighteenth-century mural paintings in several wats.Footnote ¹⁸² They clearly reflect the cosmopolitanism of the era in their depiction of various foreign figures, but European and Muslim figures are made to speak to the theme of religious conflict. Most striking are the murals of Wat Ko Kaeo Suttharam in Petchaburi, to the south of Bangkok. They are painted in a manner distinct from the courtly art of Ayutthaya and, unusually, can be precisely dated, to 1734. As Maurizio Peleggi has shown, one scene depicts a meeting described in the scriptures between the Buddha and the gurus of heretic sects. Here, the latter are dressed in the Mughal style; they are shown being defeated by the Buddha's miracles.Footnote ¹⁸³ Another scene depicts the failed attempt by Devadatta to kill Buddha by unleashing an elephant upon him: a group of European figures are shown below, forced to marvel at this event. They are looking up to a queer figure: a monk with the hat and moustache of a European. He is probably a Jesuit or MEP priest in accommodative mode, dressed as a Buddhist monk and now forced to accept the power of the dhamma through the miracle. The murals at Wat Khongkharam meanwhile show European soldiers as making up the demon troops who threatened the Buddha while he meditated: a perfect expression of the way in which the European political threat was conflated with a threat to Buddhism itself.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

The Wat Ko Kaeo Suttharam murals were painted a few years after the 1731 decree (see above) passed in the name of King Thai Sa, which prohibited missionaries from translating materials into Cambodian and Siamese scripts, preaching in Siamese, writing books that showed contempt for the Siamese religion, or converting any ‘Siamese, Mon, and Lao’—the Theravada groups that stood at the heart of the cultural and political order. Any Siamese, Mon, and Lao who embraced the Christian religion in future ‘shall be condemned to death and publicly impaled in front of the seminary’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ It was carved into stone and set up to face the seminary. What spurred this was nothing like a crisis, but rather a period of intellectual curiosity about Christianity following the discovery of Laneau's writings in the library by a member of the old royal family. It is remarkable in that Christianity was not associated with any political threat at this time. Nor was it even a religious threat, for the mission had become largely moribund.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Rather the phra khlang at the time seems to have become exercised by the discovery that, in the past, the mission had been actively proselytizing among the core groups of Theravada subjects.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In the eighteenth century, participation in core Buddhist rituals of state was increasingly established as an essential element of political loyalty.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

There is an intriguing comparison to be made here with Japan, where the early modern flirtation with Christianity had taken the more substantial form of a number of warlord conversions in the late sixteenth century. Yet, once Christianity was ejected by the solidifying Tokugawa regime, and long after it offered any political challenge, it remained as a resonant symbol of disordering ideology and foreign influence throughout the seventeenth century. Suspected Christians were made to trample on Christian images to prove they were not of that faith and Catholic priests (bateren) became literary grotesques.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In Siam too, it seems, long after the actual threat from Christianity was neutered, it lingered in the popular memory as an archetype of dangerous heresy and potential disloyalty.