James II and the First Modern Revolution: The End of Absolute Monarchy

By John Van der Kiste

This in-depth biography explores the brief and turbulent reign of King James II and the growing opposition that led to the Glorious Revolution.

James II succeeded his brother Charles II on the English throne in 1685, at a time when nothing could be taken for granted. A span of less that forty years had brought the execution of their father, Charles I, the proclamation of a republic, and the swift restoration of the monarchy. Though James inherited the makings of a stable reign, he was a deeply flawed character. Alternately pious and debauched, he was little liked by those who knew him.

Within three years, James’s efforts to promote Catholicism in a nation that had predominantly embraced the Protestant faith had exhausted the patience of both the aristocracy and the church, who jointly appealed to his son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange, to intervene. Once James fled the kingdom, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ was quickly achieved.

This book examines how the forces of Anglicanism and Jacobitism collided, how a monarch came to forfeit so much goodwill so quickly, and through his own folly aided the effortless victory of William and Mary (James’s own daughter), who at last brought a period of calm to a country that had endured so much.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781399001410

John Van der Kiste

John Van der Kiste has published over forty books including works on royal and historical biography, local history, true crime, music and fiction, and is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His previous titles include Queen Victoria's Children, Kaiser Wilhelm II and The Romanovs: Tsar Alexander II of Russia and his Family and ‘Alfred—Queen Victoria's Second Son’ and ‘Prussian Princesses’ for Fonthill. He lives in Devon.

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Introduction

In simple terms, the movement that has long been styled the Glorious Revolution was the abdication of King James II of England (VII of Scotland). During a reign of less than four years, his increasingly authoritarian and ‘papist’ rule, in which he strongly favoured Catholics and antagonised the Protestant majority of his subjects, alienated Church and State alike. Faced with an invasion in his own kingdom from his son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange, and with his support rapidly ebbing away, he fled the country. A brief interregnum followed until Parliament confirmed the status of William and his wife, Mary, James’s elder daughter, as joint sovereigns. This was, however, only the centre of a series of events in a labyrinthine timeline that embraced part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as campaigns at land and sea, and declarations and treaties involving not only the British Isles but also much of Europe.

If we also include the rise and fall of the Jacobite movement, which supported the restoration of the Stuart monarchy to the British throne, the boundaries go much further. Some would maintain that the revolution came full circle in 1746 with the defeat of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, King James’s grandson, at the battle of Culloden, and the subsequent withdrawal of support from France, its nearest and most powerful ally. Others would point to the death in 1766 of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, James, the son of King James II, whose birth in June 1688 and disputed paternity weakened what had become his father’s increasingly tenuous grip on the throne, as the end.

As to how the Revolution originated, one can make a case for saying it began with the Civil Wars of the 1640s, or the War of the Three Kingdoms of 1638-51, as the conflict is sometimes, if less often, known. There is an argument for choosing as the starting point the accession of King Charles I in 1625, or even that of the man who might be recognised as the first Jacobite, his father, King James I (James VI of Scotland) in 1603. The Jacobite cause may have withered and died in the mid-eighteenth century, but a short-lived Neo-Jacobite Revival was founded in 1886, with a number of Jacobite clubs and societies being formed. One of its major driving forces, the author and journalist Herbert Vivian, a friend of Oscar Wilde and James Whistler, stood four times as a parliamentary candidate on a specifically Jacobite platform, although he never attracted more than a handful of votes.

To try and untangle all the skeins that connect the various European powers and their role, active or passive, during the upheavals of the late seventeenth century, would require a book far longer than this to do it full justice. In this volume I have confined myself in the main to those figures at the centre of the revolution in Britain, based around James II himself, his immediate successors, and the thread that runs through their lives, times, the country that they ruled, and the consequences of what came with hindsight to be seen as a turning point in the nation’s history.

Were these consequences fully recognised at the time? There are grounds for believing that they were. Some might dispute this solely on the grounds that almost every age in history can be called a period of radical change for one reason or another. However, at least two prominent Englishmen alive at the end of the seventeenth century appear to have thought so. The term ‘glorious revolution’ is thought to have been first used by John Hampden, a Whig radical who represented Wendover in the Convention Parliament at Westminster (and grandson of the better-known ‘Ship money tax’ protester, also John Hampden, during the reign of King Charles I), in testimony before a House of Lords committee in 1689. The phrase also occurred in a sermon preached by Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury and a close friend and confidant of King William and Queen Mary, in 1706, and by writer Walter Harris, in a published history of the life and reign of King William in 1749.¹

To commentators and historians of a later generation, the phrase was well merited when viewed alongside events across the Channel. According to Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the English revolution was ‘glorious’ because it had been carried out by Parliament, not by the mob whose counterparts were inflicting several years of violence, terror and executions in France after the overthrow of King Louis XVI. As is commonly said, history is generally written by the victors, and the Whig faction that emerged triumphant in 1688-9 called it a bloodless revolution and a pivotal point in England’s national political self-determination. Moreover, the French revolution of 1789, and its Russian counterpart in 1917, sprang from violent uprisings by the working class, long denied a voice in national affairs. By contrast, its British predecessor was a more gentlemanly affair, carried out and controlled by the aristocracy, in the words of David Hosford, ‘an upper class movement initiated and dominated by members of the nobility and scions of aristocratic houses’.²

G.M. Trevelyan saw its origins as coming from a different source. Writing in the 1920s, he maintained that its glory did not consist in any deed of arms, or in any signal acts of heroism on the part of Englishmen, nor in the fact that the nation proved itself stronger than its foolish monarch. Ironically, the English owed it largely to the ambition of a European head of state, admittedly one with an English mother. It had taken the efforts of a foreign fleet and army, both admittedly friendly and welcome, ‘to enable Englishmen to recover the liberties they had muddled away in their frantic faction feuds.’ The glory of the British Revolution, he added, lay in the fact that it was bloodless, did not need either civil war, massacre, nor proscription, ‘and above all that a settlement by consent was reached of the religious and political differences that had so long and so fiercely divided men and parties.’³

A few years later Sir George Clark echoed this view, citing an interpretation from the contemporary philosopher and politician John Locke, calling the revolution ‘a masterpiece of political wisdom’, and the catalyst for an economic transformation as well as a political one. It helped to usher in a period of prosperity and order in which the squires and tradesmen flourished, and became ‘the object of almost superstitious reverence’.⁴ Subsequent historians have reinforced this view, in crediting the English revolutionaries as reorienting English foreign policy from its hostility against the Dutch Republic before the revolution to war against France a little later. They also transformed the British economy, creating England’s first national bank, and the national religious character by preparing conditions in which a more tolerant environment could come about; a more broad church in both senses of the word.⁵ Moreover, like Jacobitism, as discussed, the revolution in a broader sense had its origins in the English crisis of the 1640s and 1650s, which saw the beginning of debates on the concept and future direction of state institutions, religion and society.

Not everybody held the same opinion. One of James II’s more sympathetic twentieth-century biographers, Jock Haswell, maintained that ‘there was nothing in the least glorious about it and few events in history can rival it as a squalid tale of perfidy’.⁶ It is easy to take the view that William of Orange was a calculating politician, a chancer who was in the right place at the right time and who coolly exploited the situation to his own advantage, but history has always provided examples of such behaviour. It is indisputable that the revolution was an important milestone towards parliamentary democracy in restricting the power of any would-be over-mighty monarch with the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1689 and subsequent legislation. The Act of Settlement, twelve years later, further curtailed the sovereign’s powers by limiting royal powers of appointment and the royal power to wage war independently.

Writing in the early Victorian era, Thomas Babington Macaulay contrasted it favourably with the upheavals in France a century later. In England it had been ‘of all revolutions the least violent […] the most beneficent’. A leading modern historian, Steve Pincus, has supported his view in arguing that the revolution was bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all sensible.’⁷ Others have taken an opposite stance, notably Edward Vallance, who calls it a piece of ‘Whig smuggery’ that needs to be laid to rest.⁸ Towards the end of October 1688, violence erupted in London, with many practising Catholics killed during an orgy of savagery against people and property in London. Although there were no pitched battles after William of Orange’s forces landed in November and marched towards London, there were several small skirmishes near Cirencester, Reading and other towns, all resulting in several fatalities. At the same time, there were reports of several Irish risings (some thought to be false or at least greatly exaggerated) throughout much of England, in which King James’s disbanded Irish forces were unleashing fury against the Protestant population. For several months into the following year, even after King William III and Queen Mary II were declared as joint sovereigns, England was definitely not a nation at peace with itself. The victorious Protestants seem to have been largely to blame, with sporadic outbreaks of violence against Catholic property. In May 1689 a mob pulled down a statue of James II and systematically destroyed it, then went on an orgy of vandalism throughout the town, breaking the windows of houses owned by Catholics. In June, a minister’s house in Canterbury was attacked and ransacked because people suspected him of Jacobite sympathies. Similar wanton acts were reported throughout the country.

While one needs to be wary of the open-ended nature of bare statistics, if the parameters of revolution are extended from the 1670s to the Duke of York’s conversion to Catholicism and the Popish Plot, the protracted struggles involving Scotland and Ireland, and throughout the reign of William III and beyond to the further Jacobite rebellions during the first half of the eighteenth century, the death toll reached several thousand.

Despite the divisions, invasion from a foreign armed force, and bloodshed, it has been observed by Cristina Bravo Lozano that there was no mass popular movement to constitute a major threat to the regime of King James II. Law and order was largely maintained, and the overthrow of the king ‘must fundamentally be attributed to his loss of nerve and decision to flee in December 1688’.⁹ It is arguable that the events of 1688-9 were not so much a revolution, but more a tidying-up exercise of unfinished business. Trevelyan suggested that the expulsion of King James was nothing if not a revolutionary act, ‘but otherwise the spirit of this strange Revolution was the opposite of revolutionary’. Its purpose was not to overthrow the law, but rather to confirm it against the behaviour of a law-breaking king. The purpose was not to coerce people into one pattern of opinion in politics or religion, but to give them freedom under and by the law. It was at once liberal and conservative, a demonstration of unity between Church and State when they came together to save the laws of the land from destruction by an increasingly absolutist monarch. In the process, they became jointly and severally masters of the situation two months after he had fled the country.

Paradoxically, this most conservative of all revolutions in history was also the most liberal. Had James been overthrown either by the Whigs alone or by the Tories alone, Trevelyan concluded, the settlement that followed his downfall would not have been so liberal, or so permanent. The Convention Parliament of February 1689 united England through an intelligent compromise, ‘the Revolution Settlement’, which stanched for ever the blood feud of Roundhead and Cavalier, of Anglican and Puritan, that had broken out at Edgehill and had come to an end with the final pitched battle on English soil at Sedgemoor some four decades later.¹⁰

For the purposes of this book, the main revolution comprises the events of 1688 and early 1689, the period that saw the gradual decline and fall of King James II, and the consolidation of King William III and Queen Mary II on the throne. Nevertheless, it cannot be seen in isolation. It was in a sense the centre of a movement that had its roots running throughout the events of the previous few decades, and the aftershocks continued throughout the next fifty years or so. It was the middle; but at the risk of over-simplification, can only be viewed properly within the context of the beginning and the end. Choosing the boundaries is an arbitrary decision. To trace the roots of the revolution, I have started with the early life of James and his spiritual journey, and focused in some detail on the opening months of his reign, leading to the crucial last few months, concluding with a brief look at the consequences of the revolution and the end of Jacobitism itself.

NB In the seventeenth century, different calendars were observed in different countries: the Julian or Old Style in Britain until 1752, and the Gregorian or New Style, which was ten days ahead, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, in the Netherlands. Dates in this book are in the Julian calendar throughout.

Chapter 1

Early Life and First Exile

In 1633 King Charles I of England, his consort, Queen Henrietta Maria, and the kingdom were enjoying a period of comparative stability. It came during a few years of calm before the storm that would culminate in civil war, leading to his imprisonment, trial and execution. Not long after he had succeeded his father, James I of England and VI of Scotland, on the throne in 1625, he quarrelled with Parliament over his assumption of the royal prerogative and the Divine Right of Kings, and vowed that henceforth he would govern according to the dictates of his conscience. In 1629 he dissolved Parliament, and for the next eleven years ruled without it, as an absolute monarch.

That same year, Queen Henrietta Maria gave birth to their first child, Prince Charles James, who died within a few hours. He was followed by a second son, Charles, born one year later in May 1630. A daughter, Mary, followed in November 1631, and the second surviving son, James, on 14 October 1633.

Ironically, as king a little over half a century later, James’s obstinacy and disputes with Parliament would also lose him his throne, though unlike his father, he would keep his head. The victorious antagonist who took the Crown from him would be the son of his elder sister, as well as the husband of his eldest daughter. He was baptised at St James’s Palace on 24 November by William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the foremost champion of the Anglican Church of which his father was the head. His godparents at the ceremony were three leading figures of contemporary European Protestantism. One was Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange: it was his son William, whom James’s elder sister, Mary, would marry; their son, another William, would be the man who married his daughter Mary, and later wrest James’s throne from him. The other two sponsors were his aunt Elizabeth, the exiled Queen of Bohemia, and her son, Charles Lewis, the Elector Palatine, both of whom were then living as exiles in the Dutch Republic.

The Stuart dynasty’s European connections were thus well represented at the ceremony, albeit by proxy. Later they would exert no little influence on the little prince’s destiny. For James would lead a very chequered life, spending almost a third of it in two periods of exile on the European mainland, firstly as a young man after the execution of his father and the brief experiment of an English republic, and secondly as a former king.

The boy rapidly became his mother’s favourite. Shortly after his baptism, his father made him Duke of York and Albany. Most of his childhood was spent in the atmosphere of a brilliant royal court, mainly at the palaces of Hampton Court, Richmond and Greenwich, and under the supervision of a governor, William Seymour, Marquess of Hertford. He and his siblings were brought up in the Anglican faith. Although Queen Henrietta Maria was a devout Catholic whose outspoken defence of her religion had made some converts at court, she was allowed no say in the religious upbringing of her children, all of whom but one were brought up as staunch Protestants. The exception was her youngest, Henrietta Anne, who was born during the Civil War in 1644 in England, taken by her governess to France at the age of three and brought up there.

According to the customary protocol of his age, James was appointed Lord High Admiral of England in 1638, at the age of five. Coincidentally, this was also the year that the first rebellion to strike a blow against the rule of King Charles broke out in Scotland. It marked the end of his years of unchallenged despotism.

As a child, James was close to his elder brother Charles, but did not particularly admire him. Both princes, born three years apart, were very different in looks and personality. James, tall and fair, was considered the better-looking one, with a long lantern jaw and a rather stolid, phlegmatic temperament, inherited probably from his paternal grandmother, a Danish princess. Charles, the elder and darker, sometimes known as ‘Black Boy’, took after his maternal forebears from the Medici line. James was also regarded as having a more gentle nature during childhood and the more open-natured of the two, concealing a strong, stubborn will beneath a diplomatic manner. At the same time he appeared less tolerant of the views of others, and lacked a sense of humour. They remained unfailingly loyal to one another, but Charles found James tiresome on occasion. For his part, James thought Charles lacked the determination that would have made him a good leader, not assertive enough when dealing with his opponents. Charles might with good reason have seen himself as more easy-going, more inclined to compromise with those of conflicting opinions than his younger brother.

In 1641, while James was still only a boy of eight, he became aware that the gilded world around him could not be taken for granted. Around then, the long-contained fury of the king’s puritan and libertarian subjects had had enough of the authoritarianism of his government and Laud’s high-handed episcopal church discipline. Though he was not yet old enough to understand what was happening, he would soon learn with horror of how Parliament sought to wrest power from the Crown and substitute the rule of lords, country squires and lawyers. Above all, he would later come to hear of his father’s surrender and betrayal of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, his faithful right-hand man against whom Parliament passed an Act of Attainder on a dubious charge of treason and sent to the scaffold. It was an act he would always look upon as a fatal weakness on the part of an irresolute parent, and one he never forgot. Where his father was irresolute and evasive, he vowed he would be a man of unflinching tenacity.

Soon afterwards, in the depths of winter, he was forced to leave the security of London with his parents and move to Hampton Court. The following year, at around the time he was invested with the Order of the Garter, his father realised it was unsafe for them to stay in London any longer, and moved to York. Having been increasingly at odds with Parliament over the last year or two and suspecting that war was inevitable, he wanted to secure possession of the Royal Arsenal at Hull. On arriving there, he asked William Seymour, Marquis of Hertford, who had been appointed the prince’s guardian, to bring James to join him in contravention of Parliament’s orders. Charles had his doubts as to the loyalty of Sir John Hotham, the governor, and decided to send James there with a body of courtiers to boost the wavering obedience of the governor and citizens, on the pretext that they were paying a purely social visit.

James entered the city with his entourage, unannounced, as the people were entering for market day. The mayor gave them an official entertainment, but his and Hotham’s suspicion of the behaviour deepened the next morning, when a letter from the king arrived stating his intention of dining with Hotham that day. Hotham decided he had to prevent Charles from entering Hull, and gave orders for the bridge to be drawn up, the gates shut and the guns loaded. When the king arrived, he found the walls lined with the train bands in their steel helmets. He demanded to be allowed into the town, to which Hotham replied that he could not let him in, as Parliament had entrusted him with the safe keeping of the town. The king appealed to the soldiers at the walls, but in vain. Hotham even initially refused to release James, only doing so after some persuasion.

James was at Nottingham when his father raised the royal standard there against the Parliamentary leaders who, with support from the Puritan faction in England, were now openly defying the Crown. On 23 October, a few days after his ninth birthday, he had his first experience of being at a battlefield, when he and his brother Charles watched their father fighting against an army led by Lord Essex in the Warwickshire meadows near Edgehill. The king had initially had his sons beside him in the rearguard, but soon found it necessary to take charge of his troops, and needed a responsible adult who could conduct them to a place of safety nearby. According to one account, the princes were handed over to one of the royal physicians, William Harvey, who apparently spent most of the day under a hedge reading a book, oblivious of his illustrious charges. Another suggested that they narrowly escaped capture by parliamentarian forces that day, after being cut off in a field within close firing-range of the enemy, and taking refuge in a barn being used as a field hospital for wounded royalist soldiers.¹

James was too young to take part in the war, but the lessons he learned in those early years were central to the formation of his character as an adult. Throughout his life he would always tend to see things in black and white. To him, the royal cause was the only just one, with no room for compromise, and those who opposed the royal will had to be punished. Not long after the battle of Edgehill, he and his brother accompanied their father to Oxford. One day he asked the king when they were going home. ‘We have no home,’ was the sad reply.²

They spent about two years at Oxford, which proved invaluable for his education, as he was taught by several fellows of colleges, including Brian Duppa, the deprived Bishop of Salisbury, who would prove more responsible than most Anglican clergymen for keeping the ideals of the church alive during the forthcoming interregnum. Always a reluctant scholar, James much preferred outdoor activities to study. He learned French well enough to speak fluently and had some proficiency in music. However, he made little progress in acquiring a broad knowledge of Anglican doctrine, judging by the basic reading he undertook later to understand it when assailed by doubts raised by Catholics.

After the king’s defeat at Naseby, and the fall of Oxford which surrendered to the parliamentarians late in 1646, he was taken to London, where his own servants were dismissed from service by his captors. Otherwise the parliamentary officers treated him well, with Oliver Cromwell, leader of the parliamentary army, and therefore his father’s arch-enemy, even deigning to kiss his hand in respect. Yet when he went to London, he was aware that he had become a prisoner, separated from his parents and elder brother. For the next two years, with his sister, Mary, and his younger brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, he was placed under the guardianship of the Earl of Northumberland at St James’s Palace. Meanwhile, the Puritan army of Fairfax and Cromwell and the Presbyterian Parliament at Westminster quarrelled for control of the kingdom they had recently wrested from the king who was a prisoner, first at Holdenby House in Northamptonshire, then to Newmarket and subsequently kept under house arrest at Hampton Court. The queen had been exiled to France.

King Charles was determined to escape, and did so in November 1647. He had planned to sail for France, but was caught and imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle. When James was told of this he was bitterly upset, crying out in anger, ‘how durst any rogues to use his father after that manner?’ When a servant threatened to tell Northumberland what he had said, he tried