James II of England

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  James II of England, who reigned in Scotland as James VII, died in exile in France on the 16th of September 1701. His body was then shared out among religious houses. His heart went into a silver-gilt locket for the convent at Chaillot. His brain was sealed in a lead casket for the Scots College in Paris. His entrails were divided between two gilt urns. One went to the parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the other to the English Jesuit college at Saint-Omer. The flesh of his right arm was given to English Augustinian nuns in Paris.

  Such a scattering suits a man who divided opinion while he lived and has divided it ever since. He came to power in 1685 as the brother of the previous king. By 1689, assemblies in both England and Scotland had declared that he no longer held the throne.

  How does a king lose three kingdoms between June and December of a single year? What did he truly want: freedom of worship for his fellow Catholics, or a crown that answered to no one? And why can historians still not agree on which?

  23471436

• 2. Princes at War

  ›

  St James's Palace in London was where James was born on the 14th of October 1633, the second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France. William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury, baptised him before the year was out. Private tutors taught him alongside his older brother, the future Charles II, and George and Francis Villiers, the two sons of the Duke of Buckingham. He was designated Duke of York at birth, received the Order of the Garter in 1642, and was formally created duke in January 1644.

  In October 1642 the boy and his brother Charles were at the Battle of Edgehill, where Parliamentarian cavalry nearly captured them. The First English Civil War had begun two months earlier. James spent most of the next four years in Oxford, the Royalist wartime capital. The university made him a Master of Arts on the 1st of November 1642, and he served as colonel of a volunteer regiment of foot.

  When Oxford surrendered in June 1646, James was taken to London and kept in St James's Palace with his younger siblings Henry, Elizabeth and Henrietta. Parliament could not agree terms with Charles I, and the eldest prince was out of reach in France. So Parliament considered making James king. His father ordered him to escape. In April 1648, helped by Joseph Bampfield, he slipped past his guards and crossed the North Sea to The Hague.

  Parliament won the Second English Civil War and ordered the execution of Charles I in January 1649. The Covenanter regime in Scotland proclaimed Charles II its king and agreed to supply troops. The resulting invasion ended in defeat at Worcester in September 1651. Charles escaped capture and rejoined the exiled court in Paris, but the Royalist cause looked hopeless.

  James, like his brother, found refuge in France. He served in the French army under Turenne, first against the Fronde and later against the Spanish. There he saw real battle for the first time. One observer wrote that he "ventures himself and chargeth gallantly where anything is to be done". Turenne's favour brought him command of a captured Irish regiment in December 1652 and the rank of Lieutenant-General in 1654.

  In 1657 France, then at war with Spain, allied itself with the Commonwealth of England. Charles replied by signing a treaty with Spain, and France expelled James as a result. He quarrelled with his brother over the choice, yet he still joined the Spanish forces in Flanders led by the French exile Condé. Given six regiments of British volunteers, he fought at the Battle of the Dunes against his former French comrades.

  The Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 brought that war to an end. Spain offered James a post as an admiral in its navy, and he declined. In 1660 the Stuart Restoration returned his brother to the English throne, and a navy of his own to command was waiting for James at home.

  364723547

• 3. Navy, Colony, Company

  ›

  James was three years old when he was named Lord High Admiral, and at first the title meant nothing in practice. After the Restoration it became a real office. It brought with it the governorship of Portsmouth and the post of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. He took the work seriously. He confirmed the posts of ships' officers, replaced those ousted by the change of regime, and attended the Admiralty committees regularly.

  In the Second Anglo-Dutch War he commanded the fleet at the Battle of Lowestoft from the deck of HMS Royal Charles. A single chain shot from the Dutch flagship decapitated three courtiers standing beside him and spattered him with blood and brains. The King, perhaps thinking of the succession, took him out of active service for the rest of the war.

  The pattern repeated in the Third Anglo-Dutch War, which ran from 1672 to 1674. At the Battle of Solebay, enemy fire disabled his flagships one after another, and he had to move his flag twice. The captain of the first, HMS Prince, was killed beside him. James strode along the deck urging on the gun crews. Some accused him all the same of giving unclear orders to the French squadron, allies of the British fleet. Once again he was pulled from the front line.

  The Great Fire of London in September 1666 found Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth doing nothing. Charles II put his brother in charge of the firefighting. It was no political office, but his leadership drew notice. A witness wrote on the 8th of September that "The Duke of York hath won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the Fire". After the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667, James oversaw the survey and re-fortification of the southern coast.

  In 1664 Charles II granted James the American land between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers. The British captured the Dutch territory of New Netherland, and it and its main port, New Amsterdam, were renamed the Province and City of New York in his honour. James passed part of the colony to the proprietors George Carteret and John Berkeley. Fort Orange, 150 miles up the Hudson River, became Albany, named for his Scottish title. In 1683 he became Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, though he took no active part in running it.

  In October 1660 Charles appointed his brother Governor of the Royal Adventurers into Africa, a company later reformed as the Royal African Company in 1672. Its investors included the King, senior courtiers, ministers and admirals. It sought gold, ivory and redwood from West Africa. By 1665, however, the slave trade to the Americas brought in 25 per cent of its income. To dominate the coast, the company believed it had to drive the Dutch from their trading posts. Its ships went to seize them, backed in 1664 by the frigate Jersey under Robert Holmes. This was a major cause of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, fought from 1665 to 1667. The Navy was used to help the company in later years, which shows how far the state and a business had blurred together.

  The charter of 1672 allowed the company to build forts and factories, keep troops, and impose martial law in West Africa. In the 1680s it carried about 5,000 enslaved people a year, mostly to the English Caribbean. Many were branded on the chest with the letters "DY", for Duke of York, the company's Governor. Over its lifetime it carried more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than any other single institution. James kept the governorship until the Glorious Revolution forced him to resign.

  383735953

• 4. Marriage, Faith, Exclusion

  ›

  A promise made in 1659 shaped James's first marriage. While trying to seduce Anne Hyde, he vowed to marry her. By 1660 she was pregnant. After the Restoration, no one at court expected a prince to marry a commoner, whatever he had pledged beforehand. Her father, Edward Hyde, Charles's chief minister, joined nearly everyone else in urging the pair against it. The couple married in secret and then held an official ceremony in London on the 3rd of September 1660.

  Their first child, Charles, was born less than two months later and died in infancy, as did five more. Only two daughters survived: Mary, born on the 30th of April 1662, and Anne, born on the 6th of February 1665. Samuel Pepys observed that James was fond of his children and played with them "like an ordinary private father of a child". That was unlike the distant parenting common among royalty.

  Pepys also wrote in his diary that James "did eye my wife mightily". Although Anne Hyde was devoted to him and influenced many of his decisions, he kept mistresses, among them Arabella Churchill and Catherine Sedley. He was reputed to be "the most unguarded ogler of his time". Gilbert Burnet famously remarked that the mistresses must have been "given to him by his priests as a penance". Anne Hyde died in 1671.

  France had shown James the beliefs and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, and both he and Anne grew drawn to them. He took the Catholic Eucharist in 1668 or 1669. For almost a decade he kept the conversion secret, attending Anglican services until 1676. His closest company stayed mostly Anglican, including John Churchill and George Legge, along with French Protestants such as Louis de Duras, 2nd Earl of Feversham.

  The Test Act of 1673 ended the secrecy. Alarmed by Catholic influence at court, Parliament required all civil and military officials to swear an oath rejecting transubstantiation and to receive communion in the Church of England. James refused both and gave up his post as Lord High Admiral. His conversion became public. He was known for deep devotion and once said, "If occasion were, I hope God would give me his grace to suffer death for the true Catholic religion as well as banishment."

  Charles II opposed the conversion and ordered that Mary and Anne be raised in the Church of England. Even so, he let the widowed James marry Mary of Modena, a fifteen-year-old Italian princess. They married by proxy in a Catholic ceremony on the 20th of September 1673. She reached England on the 21st of November, when Nathaniel Crew, Bishop of Oxford, performed a brief Anglican service that did little more than recognise the proxy marriage. Many distrustful Britons saw the new duchess as an agent of the Papacy.

  In 1677 Charles arranged for James's daughter Mary to marry the Protestant William III of Orange, son of James's and Charles's sister Mary. James reluctantly agreed. Fear of a Catholic monarch lingered, because Charles and his wife, Catherine of Braganza, had no children. Then Titus Oates, a defrocked Anglican clergyman, described a "Popish Plot" to kill Charles and put the Duke of York on the throne. The plot was fabricated, but it set off a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria across the nation.

  The Earl of Shaftesbury, a former minister and now a leading enemy of Catholicism, proposed an Exclusion Bill to bar James from the succession. Some members of Parliament even wanted the crown to pass to Charles's illegitimate son, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. In 1679, with the bill close to passing, Charles dissolved Parliament. He dissolved the two elected in 1680 and 1681 for the same reason. Supporters of the bill became known as Whigs and opponents as Tories, an early step toward the two-party system. The succession was never altered, but James had to withdraw from all policy-making bodies and accept a lesser role.

  Charles sent him to Brussels. In 1680 James became Lord High Commissioner of Scotland and lived at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, tasked with suppressing an uprising and overseeing the royal government. He came back to England briefly when Charles fell ill and seemed close to death. His relations with many in Parliament, including the Earl of Danby, a former ally, were strained for good.

  On the 6th of May 1682, HMS Gloucester ran aground on a sandbank and sank, and between 130 and 250 people died. James had argued with the pilot about the ship's course. He then delayed abandoning ship, which may have raised the death toll. He barely escaped himself.

  A plot uncovered in 1683 aimed to assassinate Charles and James and spark a republican revolution in the Cromwellian style. The Rye House Plot backfired and stirred sympathy for the brothers. Several Whigs were implicated, among them the Earl of Essex and Monmouth. Monmouth confessed at first and named others, then recanted. Essex committed suicide. Monmouth fled to continental Europe. Charles increased the repression of Whigs and dissenters, and in 1684, taking advantage of his brother's recovering popularity, he invited James back onto the Privy Council. Monmouth, meanwhile, was only waiting abroad for his chance to return.

  636234711

• 5. Rebels and Decrees

  ›

  Charles II died of apoplexy on the 6th of February 1685, supposedly after converting to Catholicism on his deathbed. He left no legitimate children, so the crown passed to James, who became James II in England and Ireland and James VII in Scotland. Opposition was slight, and there were widespread reports of public rejoicing at the orderly succession. James and Mary were crowned at Westminster Abbey on the 23rd of April 1685.

  The Parliament that met in May 1685 earned the name "Loyal Parliament" for its friendliness. James had said that most former exclusionists would be forgiven if they accepted his rule. Parliament granted him a generous life income, including all the proceeds of tonnage and poundage and the customs duties. Most of Charles's officers stayed in post. The exceptions were the promotion of James's brothers-in-law, the earls of Clarendon and Rochester, and the demotion of Halifax. James worked harder as king than his brother had, but he gave less ground when advisers disagreed.

  Two rebellions followed soon after. Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll, led one in Scotland, and Monmouth led the other in southern England. Both men set out from Holland, where James's nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange, had not stopped them from recruiting. Argyll raised men mainly from his own clan, the Campbells. He had arrived with fewer than 300 and was captured at Inchinnan on the 18th of June 1685. An earlier death sentence still stood, so no new trial was held. James confirmed it and ordered it carried out within three days.

  Monmouth proclaimed himself king at Lyme Regis on the 11th of June. He could not gather enough rebels to beat even James's small standing army. His soldiers tried a surprise night attack at Sedgemoor and were routed by royal forces led by Feversham and Churchill. Monmouth was executed at the Tower of London on the 15th of July. The judge George Jeffreys then condemned many rebels to transportation and indentured servitude in the West Indies, in trials that became known as the Bloody Assizes. Around 250 rebels were executed. The easy victories hardened James against his enemies and deepened his suspicion of the Dutch.

  To guard against more rebellions, James enlarged his standing army. His subjects were alarmed by the trouble soldiers caused in the towns. A professional army in peacetime also went against English tradition and looked like a tool for a would-be autocrat. More alarming still, he used his dispensing power to let Catholics command several regiments without taking the oath required by the Test Act. Even the friendly Parliament objected. In November 1685 James prorogued it, and it never met again in his reign.

  At the start of 1686, two papers in Charles II's own hand turned up in his strong box and his closet. They set out arguments for Catholicism over Protestantism. James published them and challenged the Archbishop of Canterbury and the whole Anglican bench of bishops to refute them. "Let me have a solid answer, and in a gentlemanlike style; and it may have the effect which you so much desire of bringing me over to your church." The Archbishop refused, out of respect for the late king.

  Toleration did not stretch to everyone. James wanted the penal laws repealed in all three kingdoms, yet in the early years he refused relief to dissenters who did not petition for it. When the Scottish Parliament opened in 1685, he sent a letter asking for new penal laws against refractory Presbyterians. The Parliament answered with an act imposing death and confiscation of property on those who preached at a conventicle under a roof or took part in an open-air one. In March 1686 he wrote to the Scottish Privy Council asking for toleration for Catholics but not for rebellious Covenanters. Presbyterians would later call this period "The Killing Time".

  In May 1686 James sought a ruling from the common-law courts that he could dispense with Acts of Parliament. He dismissed judges who disagreed, along with the Solicitor General, Heneage Finch. In the case of Godden v Hales, eleven of the twelve judges ruled for the king, after six had been dismissed for refusing to promise their support. Catholics now filled the highest offices. James received the papal nuncio, Ferdinando d'Adda, the first envoy from Rome to London since the reign of Mary I. His Jesuit confessor, Edward Petre, drew particular Anglican anger. The Earl of Sunderland replaced court office-holders with "Papist" favourites, even removing the Hydes, and many Anglican supporters lost confidence in the king.

  In 1687 James issued the Declaration of Indulgence, also called the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience. It used his dispensing power to cancel the laws punishing both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. That summer he toured the western counties of England to win support. At Chester he said, "suppose... there should be a law made that all black men should be imprisoned, it would be unreasonable and we had as little reason to quarrel with other men for being of different religious opinions as for being of different complexions." In Scotland he used the same power to give relief to Catholics and partial relief to Presbyterians.

  In 1688 James ordered the Declaration read from the pulpit of every Anglican church. That pushed the bishops further away from the Supreme Governor of their church. It also left the Established Church, the monarchy's traditional ally, forced to erode its own privileges. At Oxford, he let Catholics hold important positions at Christ Church and University College. He also tried to make the Fellows of Magdalen College elect Anthony Farmer as their President. Farmer was of ill repute and believed to be a Catholic, and the order overrode the Fellows' right to choose their own head.

  In October 1687 James set about packing a Parliament that would repeal the Test Act and the Penal Laws. Convinced by addresses from Dissenters that he had their backing, he no longer saw a need to rely on Tories and Anglicans. He told the lord-lieutenants to put three questions to every Justice of the Peace. Would they consent to repeal? Would they support candidates who would? Would they accept the Declaration of Indulgence? In the first three months of 1688, hundreds who answered no were dismissed. Agents called Regulators, mostly Baptists, purged the town corporations. Their recommendations included Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Anglicans, all part of an attempt to build a permanent royal electoral machine. On the 24th of August 1688 James ordered writs issued for a general election. Then, in September, he learned that William of Orange meant to land in England, and he withdrew them.

  4743521250

• 6. The Invited Invader

  ›

  In April 1688 James re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered the Anglican clergy to read it in their churches. Seven bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury among them, petitioned him to reconsider. He had them arrested and tried for seditious libel. Their acquittal on the 30th of June destroyed his political authority.

  Queen Mary gave birth to a Roman Catholic son, James Francis Edward, on the 10th of June 1688. Until then, James's only possible heirs were his two Protestant daughters, so Anglicans could treat his pro-Catholic policies as a passing phase. A son opened the prospect of a permanent Catholic dynasty, and it displaced Mary, who had been heir presumptive. Several influential Protestants claimed the baby was supposititious and had been smuggled into the Queen's bedchamber in a warming pan. Some of them had already begun talks with William of Orange once the pregnancy became known, and the birth reinforced their convictions.

  On the 30th of June, the day of the bishops' acquittal, a group of seven Protestant nobles invited William to come to England with an army. Anti-Catholic riots in England and Scotland followed. A general feeling grew that only James's removal could prevent another civil war.

  By September it was plain that William intended to invade. James believed his own army was enough, and he refused help from Louis XIV of France, fearing the English would resent French intervention. William landed at Brixham on the 5th of November 1688. Many Protestant officers, including Churchill, went over to him, and so did James's own daughter Anne. James had the larger army, yet he lost his nerve and declined to attack.

  On the 11th of December James tried to flee to France, first throwing the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames. He was captured in Kent, then released and placed under Dutch protective guard. William had no wish to make a martyr of him and let him escape on the 23rd of December. James's cousin and ally, Louis XIV, received him and offered a palace and a pension.

  The Convention Parliament that William summoned convened on the 22nd of January 1689. It refused to say James had been deposed. Instead it held that by fleeing to France and dropping the Great Seal in the Thames he had effectively abdicated, leaving the throne vacant. Mary was declared queen, to rule jointly with her husband William as king. The ruling established that sovereignty came from Parliament, not from birth. On the 11th of April 1689, the Parliament of Scotland declared that James had forfeited the Scottish throne as well.

  The Convention Parliament issued a Declaration of Right on the 12th of February. It denounced James for abusing his power and listed his offences. They included suspending the Test Acts, prosecuting bishops for merely petitioning the Crown, keeping a standing army, and imposing cruel punishments. The Declaration formed the basis of the Bill of Rights enacted later in 1689. That Bill also barred any Roman Catholic from ascending the English throne and any English monarch from marrying one.

  3442501524

• 7. Exile and Pretenders

  ›

  French troops helped James land in Ireland in March 1689. The Irish Parliament did not follow England's example. It declared that James remained king and passed the Great Act of Attainder against those who had rebelled against him. At his urging, it also passed an Act for Liberty of Conscience, granting religious freedom to Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. William came in person at the head of an army, and James was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne on the 1st of July 1690. He fled to France once more, leaving from Kinsale, and never returned to any of his former kingdoms.

  In Ireland, his desertion of his supporters earned him the name Séamus an Chaca, a crude insult. Yet the historian Breandán Ó Buachalla argues that "Irish political poetry for most of the eighteenth century is essentially Jacobite poetry". Ó Buachalla and fellow historian Éamonn Ó Ciardha both argue that James and his successors served as messianic figures for all classes in Ireland throughout that century.

  In France, James was allowed to live in the royal château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. His wife and some of his supporters fled with him, among them the Earl of Melfort. Most, though not all, were Catholic. His last child, Louisa Maria Teresa, was born in 1692. In 1696 some supporters in England tried to assassinate William, but the plot failed, and the backlash made James's cause less popular. That same year Louis XIV offered to have James elected King of Poland. James refused, afraid the English would think accepting the Polish crown disqualified him from theirs. After Louis made peace with William in 1697, he offered James little help.

  In his last years James lived as an austere penitent. He wrote a memorandum for his son on how to govern England. It specified that Catholics should hold one Secretary of State, one Commissioner of the Treasury, the post of Secretary at War, and most of the army's officers.

  The rest of his body lay in a triple sarcophagus, two wooden coffins and one of lead, at St Edmund's Chapel in the Church of the English Benedictines in the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. Henri-Emmanuel de Roquette gave the funeral oration. James was not buried but placed in a side chapel, and lights burned round his coffin until the French Revolution. In 1734 the Archbishop of Paris heard evidence in support of his canonisation and titled him a Servant of God. Nothing came of it. During the French Revolution, the tomb was raided.

  James's younger daughter Anne succeeded William when he died in 1702. The Act of Settlement had provided that if the line set out in the Bill of Rights died out, the crown would go to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her Protestant heirs. Sophia was a granddaughter of James VI and I through his eldest daughter, Elizabeth Stuart. Anne died in 1714, less than two months after Sophia, so the crown passed to Sophia's son George I, Elector of Hanover and Anne's second cousin.

  At James's death, Louis XIV and James's remaining supporters, later called Jacobites, recognised his son James Francis Edward as "James III and VIII". He led a rising in Scotland in 1715, shortly after George I took the throne, and was defeated. His son Charles Edward Stuart led another in 1745 and was beaten again. These were the last serious attempts to restore the Stuart dynasty. The claims passed to Charles's younger brother Henry Benedict Stuart, the Dean of the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. Henry was the last of James II's legitimate descendants. He died childless in 1807, and no relative has publicly acknowledged the Jacobite claim since.

  1749482655

• 8. Historians Divided

  ›

  Lord Macaulay led the Whig historians who cast James as a cruel absolutist and described his reign as "tyranny which approached to insanity". G. M. Trevelyan, Macaulay's great-nephew, and David Ogg were more balanced. Even so, they still called James a tyrant, his tolerance a fraud, and his reign an aberration in British history. In 1892 A. W. Ward wrote in the Dictionary of National Biography that James was "obviously a political and religious bigot", although never without "a vein of patriotic sentiment".

  In 1928 the writer and Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc broke with that tradition. He portrayed James as an honourable champion of freedom of conscience, and his enemies as a small clique of great fortunes. Even Belloc admitted that James treated the Catholic church as the sole authoritative voice on earth and would never consider the slightest compromise.

  By the 1960s and 1970s, Maurice Ashley and Stuart Prall had begun to reconsider James's motives for granting toleration, while still noting his autocratic rule. Ashley called James and William "men of ideals as well as human weaknesses". Writing in 2000, John Miller accepted that James was an absolutist. He argued, though, that James's main concern was religious liberty and civil equality for Catholics, and that the absolutist methods were a means to that end.

  W. A. Speck wrote in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004 that James was genuinely committed to toleration but also sought to increase the power of the crown. Unlike the Dutch government, James was too autocratic to combine freedom of conscience with popular government. Speck wrote that James "would rather live in exile with his principles intact than continue to reign as a limited monarch".

  Tim Harris, in his 2006 book, offered a list of possible verdicts. James might have been an egotistical bigot, a tyrant, naive, or even plain stupid. Or he might have been a well-intentioned, enlightened despot ahead of his time. Harris wrote, "The jury will doubtless remain out on James for a long time."

  Steven Pincus took on that ambivalence in his 2009 book 1688: The First Modern Revolution. He argued that James deliberately followed Louis XIV in trying to create a modern Catholic polity, with a centralising and extremely bureaucratic state. In his view, James fell less because Protestants resisted Catholicisation than because the whole nation turned against his intrusive state and taxation apparatus. Pincus presents an intelligent, strategic monarch whose French-style vision lost out to supporters of an entrepreneurial Dutch economic model.

  Scott Sowerby answered him in 2013 in Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution. English taxes stayed low under James, at about 4% of national income. In Louis XIV's France, taxes were at least twice as high as a proportion of GDP, so building a French-style state looked unlikely. Sowerby adds that Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians welcomed the king's push for a new "Magna Carta for liberty of conscience". In his account, Dutch and English elites feared James was joining Louis XIV in a supposed "holy league" to destroy Protestantism across northern Europe, and that fear brought him down.

  4522345024