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James II of England |
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James is best known for his belief in absolute monarchy and his attempts to create religious liberty for his subjects. Both of these went against the wishes of the English Parliament and of most of his subjects. Parliament, opposed to the growth of absolutism that was occurring in other European countries, as well as to the loss of legal supremacy for the Church of England, saw their opposition as a way to preserve traditional English liberties. This tension made James's three-year reign a struggle for supremacy between the Parliament and the Crown, resulting in his ouster, the passage of the English Bill of Rights, and the Hanoverian succession. Birth and early lifeJames, the second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, was born at St. James's Palace on 14 October 1633.[3] Later that same year, James was baptized by William Laud, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury.[4] James was educated by tutors, along with his brother, the future King Charles II, and the two sons of the Duke of Buckingham.[5] At the age of three, James was appointed Lord High Admiral; the position was initially honorary, but would become a substantive office after the Restoration, when James was an adult.[6]Civil WarJames was invested with the Order of the Garter in 1642,[7] and created Duke of York in 1644.[4] As the King's disputes with the English Parliament grew into the English Civil War James stayed in Oxford, a Royalist stronghold.[8] When the city surrendered after the siege of Oxford in 1646, Parliamentary leaders ordered the Duke of York to be confined in St. James's Palace.[9] In 1648, he escaped from the Palace and from there he went to The Hague in disguise.[10] When Charles I was executed by the rebels in 1649, monarchists proclaimed James's older brother, Charles, as King Charles II.[11] Charles II was recognized by the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of Ireland, and was crowned King of Scots at Scone, in Scotland in 1651. Although he was proclaimed king at Jersey, Charles was unable to secure the Crown of England, and consequently fled to France and exile.[11]Exile in France) Turenne, James's commander in France RestorationMarriageAfter Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 and the subsequent collapse of the Commonwealth in 1660, Charles II was restored to the English throne. Although James was the heir-presumptive, it seemed unlikely that he would inherit the Crown, as Charles was still a young man capable of fathering children.[17] Upon his brother's restoration, James was created Duke of Albany in Scotland, to go along with his English title, Duke of York. Upon his return to England, James produced an immediate controversy by announcing his engagement to Anne Hyde, the daughter of Charles's chief minister, Edward Hyde, Charles's advisor.[18] In 1659, while attempting to seduce her, James promised he would marry Anne.[19] Anne became pregnant in 1660, but following the Restoration and James's return to power, no one at the royal court expected a prince to marry a commoner, no matter what he had pledged beforehand.[20] Although nearly everyone, including Anne's father, urged the two not to marry, they did so.[20] The couple was married secretly, then went through an official marriage ceremony on 3 September 1660, in London. Their first child, Charles, was born less than two months later, but died in infancy, as did five further sons and daughters.[20] Only two daughters survived: Mary (born 30 April 1662) and Anne (born 6 February 1665).[21] James's wife was devoted to him and influenced many of his decisions.[22] Even so, he kept a variety of mistresses, including Arabella Churchill and Catherine Sedley, and was reputed to be "the most unguarded ogler of his time."[23] Anne Hyde died in 1673.Military and political officesAfter the Restoration, James was confirmed as Lord High Admiral, an office that carried with it the subsidiary appointments of Governor of Portsmouth and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.[24] James commanded the Royal Navy during the Second (1665–1667) and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1672–1674). Following the raid on the Medway in 1667, James oversaw the survey and re-fortification of the southern coast.[25] The office of Lord High Admiral, combined with his revenue from post office and wine tariffs (granted him by Charles upon his restoration) gave James a sufficient salary to keep a sizable court household.[26]Following its capture by the English in 1664, the Dutch territory of New Netherland was named New York in James's honour. Fort Orange, 240 kilometres (150 miles) north on the Hudson River, was renamed Albany after James's Scottish title.[20] In 1683, he became the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but did not take an active role in its governance.[20] James also headed the Royal African Company, which participated in the slave trade.[27] Conversion to Catholicism) Mary of Modena, James's second wife Growing fears of Catholic influence at court led Parliament to introduce a new Test Act in 1673.[31] Under this Act, all civil and military officials were required to take an oath (in which they were required not only to disavow the doctrine of transubstantiation, but also denounce certain practices of the Roman Catholic Church as "superstitious and idolatrous") and to receive communion under the auspices of the Church of England.[32] James refused to perform both actions, instead choosing to relinquish the post of Lord High Admiral. His conversion to Catholicism was thereby made public.[31] Charles II opposed the conversion, ordering that James' daughters, Mary and Anne, be raised as Protestants.[33] Nevertheless, in 1673, he allowed James to marry the Catholic Mary of Modena, a fifteen-year-old Italian princess.[34] Many of the English, distrustful of Catholicism, regarded the new Duchess of York as an agent of the Pope.[35] Exclusion CrisisIn 1677, James reluctantly consented to his daughter Mary's marriage to the Protestant Prince of Orange, William III (who was also James's nephew,) acquiescing after Charles and William had agreed upon the marriage.[36] Despite the Protestant marriage, fears of a potential Catholic monarch persisted, intensified by the failure of Charles II and his wife, Catherine of Braganza, to produce any children. A defrocked Anglican clergyman, Titus Oates, spoke of a "Popish Plot" to kill Charles and put the Duke of York on the Throne.[37] The fabricated plot caused a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria to sweep across the nation.) The Duke of Monmouth was involved in plots against James. On the orders of the King, James left England for Brussels.[43] In 1680, he was appointed Lord High Commissioner of Scotland and took up his residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh to suppress an uprising and oversee royal government there.[44] James returned to England for a time when Charles was stricken ill and appeared to be near death.[45] The hysteria of the plot eventually faded, but James's relations with many in Parliament, including the Earl of Danby, a former ally, were forever strained and a solid segment of Parliament had turned against him.[46] Return to favourIn 1683, a plot was uncovered to assassinate Charles and James and spark a republican revolution.[47] This conspiracy, known as the Rye House Plot, backfired upon its conspirators and provoked a wave of sympathy for the King and James.[48] Several notable Whigs, including the Earl of Essex and the king's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, were implicated.[47] Monmouth initially confessed to complicity in the plot, implicating fellow-plotters, but later recanted.[47] Essex committed suicide and Monmouth and several others were obliged to flee into continental exile.[49] Charles reacted to the plot by increasing repression of Whigs and Dissenters.[47] Taking advantage of James's rebounding popularity, Charles invited him back onto the privy council in 1684.[50] While some in Parliament remained wary of the possibility of a Catholic King, the threat of excluding James from the throne had passed.ReignAscension to the throne) Statue of James II in Trafalgar Square, London Two rebellionsSoon after becoming king, James faced a rebellion in southern England led by his nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, and another rebellion in Scotland led by Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll.[56] Argyll and Monmouth both began their expeditions from the Netherlands, where James's nephew, William III, had neglected to detain them or put a stop to their recruitment efforts.[57] Argyll sailed to Scotland and, on arriving there, raised recruits mainly from amongst his own clan, the Campbells.[58] The rebellion was quickly crushed, and Argyll himself was captured at Inchinnan on 18 June 1685.[58] Having arrived with fewer than 300 men and unable to convince many more to flock to his standard, Argyll never posed a credible threat to James.[59] He was executed on 30 June in Edinburgh.Argyll's rebellion was coordinated with Monmouth's, but the latter was more dangerous to James. Monmouth proclaimed himself King at Lyme Regis on 11 June.[60] He attempted to raise recruits but was unable to gather enough rebels to defeat even James's small standing army.[61] Monmouth attacked the King's forces at night, in an attempt at surprise, but was defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor.[61] The King's forces, led by Feversham and Churchill, quickly dispersed the ill-prepared rebels.[61] Monmouth himself was captured and executed at the Tower of London on 15 July.[62] The king's judges—most notably, George Jeffreys—condemned many of the rebels to transportation and indentured servitude in the West Indies in a series of trials that came to be known as the Bloody Assizes.[63] Some 250 of the rebels were executed.[64] While both rebellions were defeated easily enough, the effect on James was to harden his resolve against his enemies and to increase his suspicion of the Dutch.[65] Absolutism and religious libertyTo protect himself from further rebellions, James sought safety in an enlarged standing army.[66] Even more alarming to Parliament was James's use of his dispensing power to allow Roman Catholics to command several regiments without having to take the oath mandated by the Test Act.[66] When even the previously supportive Parliament objected to these measures, James ordered Parliament prorogued in November 1685, never to meet again in his reign.[67]Religious tension grew from 1686. James allowed Roman Catholics to occupy the highest offices of the Kingdoms, and received at his court the papal nuncio, Ferdinando d'Adda, the first representative from Rome to London since the reign of Mary I.[66] James's Jesuit confessor, Edward Petre, was a particular object of Protestant ire.[68] When the King's Secretary of State, the Earl of Sunderland, began replacing office-holders at court with Catholic favorites, James began to lose the confidence of many of his Anglican supporters.[69] Sunderland's purge of office-holders even extended to the King's Anglican brothers-in-law and their supporters.[69] In 1687, James issued the Declaration of Indulgence, also known as the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, in which he used his suspending power to negate the effect of laws punishing Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters.[70] James ordered the Declaration read from the pulpits of every Anglican church, further alienating the Anglican bishops against the Catholic head of their church.[71] While the Declaration elicited some thanks from Catholics and dissenters, it left the Established Church, the traditional ally of the monarchy, in the difficult position of being forced to erode its own privileges.[71] The King provoked further opposition by attempting to reduce the Anglican monopoly on education.[72] At the University of Oxford, James offended Anglicans by allowing Catholics to hold important positions in Christ Church and University College, two of Oxford's largest colleges. He also attempted to force the Protestant Fellows of Magdalen College to elect Anthony Farmer, a man of generally ill repute who was believed to be secretly Catholic,[73] as their president when the Protestant incumbent died, a violation of the Fellows' right to elect a candidate of their own choosing.[72] Glorious Revolution) James's nephew, William, was invited to "save the Protestant religion". ) John Churchill had been a member of James's household for many years, but defected to William of Orange in 1688. William convened a Convention Parliament, which declared that James's flight and abandonment of the Great Seal constituted an abdication of the government, and that the Throne had then become vacant.[84] James's daughter Mary was declared Queen; she was to rule jointly with her husband William. The Parliament of Scotland followed suit on 11 April 1689.[85] The Parliament passed a Bill of Rights that charged James II with abusing his power; amongst other things, it criticised the suspension of the Test Acts, the prosecution of the Seven Bishops for merely petitioning the Crown, the establishment of a standing army and the imposition of cruel punishments.[86] The Bill also stipulated that no Catholic would henceforth be permitted to ascend to the English throne, nor could any English monarch marry a Catholic.[87] Later yearsWar in IrelandWith the assistance of French troops, James landed in Ireland in March 1689.[88] The Irish Parliament did not follow the example of the English Parliament; it declared that James remained King and passed a massive bill of attainder against those who had rebelled against him.[89] At James's urging, the Irish Parliament passed an Act for Liberty of Conscience that granted religious freedom to all Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.[90] James worked to build an army in Ireland, but was ultimately defeated at the Battle of the Boyne on 1 July 1690 when William arrived, personally leading an army to defeat James and reassert English control.[91] James fled to France once more, departing from Kinsale, never to return to any of his former kingdoms.[91]Return to exileIn France, James was allowed to live in the royal château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.[92] The Queen and some of his supporters fled with him, including the Earl of Melfort; most, but not all, were Catholic.[93] Some supporters in England attempted to restore James to the throne by assassinating William III in 1696, but the plot failed and the backlash made James's cause less popular.[94] Louis XIV's offer to have James elected King of Poland in the same year was rejected, for James feared that acceptance of the Polish Crown might (in the minds of the English people) render him incapable of being King of England. After Louis concluded peace with William in 1697, he ceased to offer much in the way of assistance to James.[95]During his last years, James lived as an austere penitent.[96] He died of a brain hemorrhage on 16 September 1701 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.[97] His body was laid to rest in a coffin at the Chapel of Saint Edmund in the Church of the English Benedictines in the Rue St. Jacques, Paris.[97] In 1734, the Archbishop of Paris heard evidence to support James's canonization, but nothing came of it.[97] During the French Revolution, James's tomb was raided and his relics scattered.[98] Succession) James's son was known as "James III and VIII" to his supporters, and "The Old Pretender" to his enemies. James's son, James Francis Edward was recognised as King at his father's death by Louis XIV of France and James's remaining supporters (later known as Jacobites) as "James III and VIII."[100] He led a rising in Scotland in 1715 shortly after George I's accession, but was defeated.[101] Jacobites rose again in 1745 led by Charles Edward Stuart, James II's grandson, and were again defeated.[102] Since then, no serious attempt to restore the Stuart heir has been made. Charles's claims passed to his younger brother Henry Benedict Stuart, the Dean of the College of Cardinals of the Catholic Church.[103] Henry was the last of James II's legitimate descendants, and no relative has publicly acknowledged the Jacobite claim since then.[104] HistoriographyHistorical analysis of James II has gone through considerable change since he was overthrown. Initially, Whiggish historians, led by Lord Macaulay, cast James as a cruel absolutist and his reign as "tyranny which approached to insanity."[105] Subsequent scholars, such as G. M. Trevelyan and David Ogg, while more balanced than Macaulay, continued Macaulay's tradition into the twentieth century, characterizing James as a tyrant, his attempts at religious tolerance as a fraud, and his reign as an aberration in the course of British history.[106] In 1892, A. W. Ward wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography that James was "obviously a political and religious bigot", although never devoid of "a vein of patriotic sentiment"; "his conversion to the church of Rome made the emancipation of his fellow-catholics in the first instance, and the recovery of England for catholicism in the second, the governing objects of his policy."[107]) Belloc was a notable apologist for James II. James was genuinely committed to religious toleration, but also sought to increase the power of the crown. He wished that all his subjects could be as convinced as he was that the Catholic church was the one true church. He was also convinced that the established church was maintained artificially by penal laws which proscribed nonconformity. If these were removed, and conversions to Catholicism were encouraged, then many would take place … James underestimated the appeal of protestantism in general and the Church of England in particular. His was the zeal and even bigotry of a narrow-minded convert...[112]adding that, unlike the government of the Netherlands, "James was too autocratic to combine freedom of conscience with popular government. He resisted any check on the monarch's power. That is why his heart was not in the concessions he had to make in 1688. He would rather live in exile with his principles intact than continue to reign as a limited monarch."[112] Tim Harris's conclusions from his 2006 book reflect the crossroads of modern scholarship on James II: The jury will doubtless remain out on James for a long time. What exactly was he trying to achieve? Was he an egotistical bigot who wanted to promote Catholicism at all costs and refused to listen to any who questioned him? Was he a tyrant who rode roughshod over the will of the vast majority of his subjects (at least in England and Scotland) and subverted the rule of law as he took his three kingdoms further down the road of monarchical absolutism? Was he simply naïve, or even perhaps plain stupid, unable to appreciate the realities of political power in early modern Britain and the fact that there were just some things a ruler—no matter how absolute in theory—could never get away with? Or was he a well-intentioned and even enlightened ruler—an enlightened despot well ahead of his time, perhaps—who was merely trying to do what he thought was best for his subjects?[113] Titles, styles, honours, and armsTitles
StylesThe official style of James II was "James the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc." (The claim to France was only nominal, and was asserted by every English King from Edward III to George III, regardless of the amount of French territory actually controlled.)James was created "Duke of Normandy" by King Louis XIV of France, December 31 1660. This was a few months after the restoration of his brother Charles II to the English and Irish thrones (Charles II had been crowned King of Scotland in 1651), and probably was done as a political gesture of support for James - since his brother also would have claimed the title "Duke of Normandy." Honours) Half-Crown coin of James II, 1686. The inscription reads IACOBUS II DEI GRATIA (James II by the Grace of God)
ArmsHis arms as King were: Quarterly, I and IV Grandquarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lis Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England); II Or a lion rampant within a tressure flory-counter-flory Gules (for Scotland); III Azure a harp Or stringed Argent (for Ireland).AncestorsAncestors of James II
IssueChildren of James II
TitlesTitles of James II
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