James II

King of England (r. 1685-1688)

• Born: October 14, 1633
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 16, 1701
• Place of death: Saint-Germain, near Paris, France

Although he was not a successful king, James II had a fruitful career as duke of York before he reached the throne. He was a distinguished soldier and sailor and an efficient, industrious naval administrator. His pro-Catholic policies as monarch, however, led directly to the Glorious Revolution and the end of the Stuart Dynasty.

Early Life

The future James II was born on October 14, 1633, at Saint James’s Palace in London. He was the second surviving son of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria . Three and one-half years younger than his elder brother, the future Charles II

James lived his childhood and youth in the midst of dramatic and shattering political events. Charles I’s autocratic rule steadily antagonized Parliament, and civil war broke out in 1642. When James was only eight years old, he found himself a witness to the first battle of the war, at Edgehill. After the battle, James was sent to Oxford, where he remained until the end of the first phase of the war. Because of the disruption the war caused, James received an inadequate and incomplete education, and he received little direct attention from his parents.

When the Parliamentary forces triumphed, James was confined to Saint James’s Palace in London. In 1648, however, Royalists planned his escape: Disguised in girl’s clothing, the young duke slipped out of the country and gained sanctuary in Holland. The following year, having traveled to Saint-Germain, near Paris, to be with his mother, he heard the news that his father had been tried and executed. It needs little imagination to grasp the devastating effect of such an event on a fifteen-year-old boy. The stubbornness and inflexibility that were to mark his brief reign as king arose in part because of his belief that his father might have saved his throne had he acted more firmly in his dealings with Parliament.

In 1652, after serving a brief period as governor of the Channel Islands while his brother, now Charles II, fought in Scotland to regain his kingdom, James became a soldier. He fought in four campaigns in France—on the Royalist side in the civil war, and then against the invading Spanish—under the command of the famous Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, viscount de Turenne. Brave and resourceful, he became at the age of twenty the youngest of Turenne’s lieutenants general.

James’s years in France were to prove the happiest and most successful of his life. Tall, fair, handsome, and charming, he made a strong impression on his contemporaries. In 1655, he first met Anne Hyde, daughter of the earl of Clarendon, and she became his wife in 1660. She later bore him two daughters.

In 1657, James reluctantly changed sides and took up service with the Spanish army. Spain was supporting the English Royalist cause in opposition to the alliance between the English Protectorate (1653-1659) and France. The Battle of the Dunes (1658), in which James fought, resulted in a defeat for the Spanish and victory for the French.

In 1660, the republican factions in England quarreled, and Charles II was invited to return. James was appointed lord high admiral, a post that he had nominally held since he was a child. At the age of twenty-six, he was back in his homeland and heir presumptive to the throne.

Life’s Work

As lord high admiral, James was a hardworking and efficient naval administrator, and he also involved himself with trade and colonial affairs. He was responsible for sending an expeditionary force to New England that captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch, renaming it New York in his honor. When trade rivalries with Holland resulted in the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-1667, James was joint commander of the English fleet, and he distinguished himself in the victorious sea battle of Lowestoft. It was his first experience of war at sea. In 1672, when war with the Dutch broke out again, he became supreme commander of the fleet and defeated the Dutch at the Battle of Southwold Bay.

It was during this period of his greatest successes, however, that the seeds of James’s downfall were being sown. He had become sympathetic to Catholicism during his years in France, and sometime between 1660 and 1671 he finally converted. James ceased to take the sacraments of the Church of England in 1672, and in 1673, he married his second wife, Mary of Modena, an Italian Roman Catholic. These developments were of enormous significance in Protestant England, where Catholicism was disliked and feared. Events came to a head in 1678, when rumors of a Jesuit plot to kill the king (which became known as the Popish Plot ) led to a movement to ban Catholics from Parliament and to exclude James from succession to the throne. Charles II felt compelled to send his Catholic brother into exile until the storm died down. It was three years before James was recalled to England in March, 1682, at a time of comparative peace and quiet. By 1684, James had rejoined the Privy Council and had resumed his position as lord high admiral.

When Charles II died in 1685, James duly acceded to the throne. His position appeared secure. The new Parliament was composed mostly of loyal monarchists; the anti-Papacy phase appeared to be over. Parliament voted James II a large revenue for life. A brief rebellion in June by the duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, was quickly put down. The rebellion actually strengthened James’s position, enabling him to justify the establishment of a standing army.

James then began to press ahead with a policy of religious toleration, to include Protestant Nonconformists as well as Catholics. He allowed Catholics to hold important positions in the universities and in the army and appointed a Jesuit to the Privy Council. His policy of toleration culminated in the first Declaration of Indulgence in 1687, but his ultimate goal was the repeal of the two Test Acts (under which Catholics were not allowed to hold public office) and of the penal laws against Dissenters. He was unprepared for the fears and opposition that his policy was to arouse, however, and he proceeded far too quickly. He did not appreciate that he was alienating important members of the Church of England, whose support he needed if his policies were to succeed. He took that support too much for granted. Many of his subjects believed that it was James II’s secret plan eventually to compel the entire country to embrace Roman Catholicism.

James’s instruction that the Declaration of Indulgence should be read out in the churches in May, 1688, precipitated a chain of events that led to his downfall. When the majority of the clergy refused to do as he wished, James imprisoned seven bishops, including the archbishop of Canterbury, and charged them with seditious libel. This action antagonized the entire Church of England.

Then in June, the queen gave birth to a son, greatly increasing the prospects of a Catholic dynasty being established, prospects that the country as a whole found deeply disturbing. The situation deteriorated to such an extent that prominent English noblemen invited the Protestant William III of Orange, the king’s nephew and son-in-law (he was married to Mary, the king’s daughter), to intervene in England. When James discovered that a Dutch invasion force was being mounted against him, he belatedly tried to reverse his policies and pacify the Church of England, but these were panic measures and had little effect.

William of Orange landed in November, 1688, and immediately there were massive defections from James’s own military forces. Even his two daughters and his two sons-in-law deserted him. In December, seeing no other course of action, James joined his queen in exile in France. Because no blood was spilled in the course of this seizure of power by William, the event came to be known as the Glorious Revolution . The following year, James tried to regain his throne by leading an expedition to Ireland, planning afterward to invade Scotland, where support for him remained strong. James, however, was defeated by the larger army of William III at the Battle of the Boyne in June, 1690. He again fled to France and spent the remainder of his life at Saint-Germain, near Paris, with an allowance provided by the French government. During his exile he devised various unlikely schemes to win back his kingdom, and he became increasingly occupied with practicing his religious faith. He died on September 16, 1701.

Significance

History has judged James II harshly, as one of the least effective English kings. When he came to the throne, he was hailed by his countrymen with enthusiasm and goodwill: His record as soldier, sailor, and administrator had been exemplary. Within four years, however, he managed to alienate so many important groups in the country that he was forced ignominiously to abandon his own kingdom. In the crisis of 1688-1689, his military skill and courage deserted him, and his indecisiveness prevented him from asserting his authority at a time when he might still have prevailed.

James’s central error as king lay in his failure to appreciate the need for subtlety and diplomacy in his dealings with Parliament. He was an arrogant and stubborn man who tended to treat his advisers as mere servants; he badly miscalculated in his belief that the Church’s traditional loyalty to the Crown would hold no matter what he did. He did not realize that in granting personal exemptions to the Test Acts so that he could appoint Catholics to high positions, he was flouting the authority of Parliament, a course of action that had plunged the country into civil war only forty years previously.

James’s inflexibility was rooted in other aspects of his character. He was an honest and straightforward man, without guile. He was unable, for example, to conceal his enthusiasm for his Catholic faith—unlike Charles II, who had also been a Catholic, but who had upheld the rights and privileges of the Church of England. It is likely, however, that James genuinely believed in the principle of religious toleration, the freedom of all Christians to worship as they chose. In this, he was certainly ahead of his time, because the emancipation he proposed was not fully achieved until the nineteenth century. The contemporary fear—which was endorsed by historians right up to the nineteenth century—that he aimed forcibly to bring Great Britain once more under papal authority, was probably unfounded. The tragedy of James II was that a highly principled man of genuine religious feeling, who was not without courageous achievement, should have become so inexplicably obtuse on so many important occasions and issues in his short-lived mismanagement of his kingdom.

Bibliography

Ashley, Maurice. The Glorious Revolution of 1688. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967. The best account of the year in which James was deposed, by a senior historian of the Stuart period. Concise, reliable, and balanced.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. James II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Sober, fair, and objective portrait that does not minimize James’s faults but nevertheless gives full weight to his positive qualities.

Belloc, Hilaire. James the Second. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1928. Enthusiastic, Roman Catholic defense of James, but lacking in objectivity and balance. Contains an excellent account of the Battle of the Boyne.

Clarke, James. Life of James II. 2 vols. London: Carlton House, 1816. Primary source, used by all subsequent biographers. Much of it consists of the official life, based in part on James’s memoirs, which William Diccoonson compiled shortly after James’s death.

Haswell, Jock. James II: Soldier and Sailor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972. Study of James as soldier and sailor, much of which closely follows the account in Clarke (see above). It supplements Turner’s biography (see below), which does not adequately cover James’s military and naval career.

Miller, John. King James. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Explores the political, diplomatic, and religious issues that shaped James’s brief reign.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Popery and Politics, 1660-1688. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Valuable and unprejudiced study. Miller shows how anti-Catholicism was a major force in late seventeenth century English politics, but argues it was not the threat that English Protestants considered it to be.

Mullett, Michael A. James II and English Politics, 1678-1688. New York: Routledge, 1994. Focuses on the central role of James, duke of York and later king of England, during this crucial decade within the wider context of political and religious developments.

Turner, Francis Charles. James II. New York: Macmillan, 1948. A scholarly, solid, and thorough attempt to understand James II in the context of his time. Turner treats James more kindly than some historians but unconvincingly argues that James suffered from a mysterious mental disease.