James II

I

Introduction

James II (1633-1701), King of England, Wales, Ireland, and, as James VII, Scotland (1685-1688). James ruled his four kingdoms from the death of his brother Charles II in February 1685 until he lost his throne to his daughter and her husband, who invaded England in November 1688 and in February 1689 were crowned Mary II and William III.

II

Early Life

James was born in London on October 14, 1633, the second surviving son of King Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria, the Roman Catholic daughter of King Louis XIII of France. Soon afterwards, James was created Duke of York and Albany, the title by which he was generally known until he became king. Before his ninth birthday, his father was at war with his opponents in all four kingdoms, and James was present both at Nottingham on August 22, 1642, when Charles I ceremonially declared war on the English Parliamentarians, and a few months later at the first major engagement of the English Civil War at the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642. James spent most of the war at Oxford, the Royalist headquarters, but when his father capitulated to the English Parliamentarians in 1646, James was taken by the victors to London and, with his elder sister Mary and younger brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, put in the charge of the Parliamentarian Earl of Northumberland. In April 1648, however, he escaped to continental Europe, where he spent the next 12 years in exile. While he was across the English Channel, his father was executed, his brother Charles tried unsuccessfully to regain the throne with Scottish help, and Britain and Ireland were ruled by a republic. James spent most of this time as a soldier, first in the early 1650s in the French army of his hero, the Vicomte de Turenne, and then from 1657 in the Spanish army, fighting the English forces of the Cromwellian Protectorate at the Battle of the Dunes in the Spanish Netherlands, in June 1658, and elsewhere. In November 1658, he was forced to marry his pregnant mistress, Anne Hyde, the daughter of Charles II’s chief adviser, Sir Edward Hyde (later the Earl of Clarendon).

III

Return from Exile

In May 1660, after the English republic collapsed in the winter of 1659-1660, James returned to England with his brother, Charles II, who was restored to the throne. His main roles in the early part of the Restoration included patronage of English overseas trade (from 1664 he was governor of the Royal Fisheries Company, and then governor of the Company of Royal Adventurers, trading to Africa, a company that in 1672 became the Royal African Company, trading mainly in slaves), colonization (he was from 1664 proprietor of the American colony whose ownership was contested between the English and the Dutch, which the English, in James’s honour, called New York), and the English navy. As Lord High Admiral from 1660 to 1673 he played a part (along with important subordinates like Sir William Penn, Sir Peter Pett, Sir George Calvert, and Samuel Pepys) in organizing the navy in the second Anglo-Dutch War of the 17th century, between 1665 and 1667. He was onboard ship at the naval battle off Lowestoft in June 1665. The war ended disastrously for the English after the Dutch captured the prize of the English fleet in the River Medway in June 1667. The main blame for this national disaster, however, fell not on James but on his father-in-law, the Earl of Clarendon, who fled into exile in order to escape impeachment by Parliament. When a third Anglo-Dutch war began in 1672, James retained his office as Lord High Admiral. Again he was present at a major sea battle, off Southwold Bay in May 1672, at which he nearly lost his life. In 1673, though, he was forced to resign his post when he made public a decision that was to have major consequences for his public career: his conversion to Catholicism.

IV

A Catholic Heir

Although he had resisted his mother’s attempts to convert him to her faith early in his life and conformed outwardly to the Church of England in the 1660s, it was widely known by 1669 that he had converted to Catholicism. By 1672 he had stopped taking communion in the national Church, and in 1673 he resigned his office as Lord High Admiral, as he was required to do by the Test Act of that year which made it illegal for Catholics to hold public office. As the heir to the throne if Charles should die childless, James’s open commitment to Catholicism and his second marriage to a Catholic princess, Mary of Modena, in September 1673 (his first wife had died in 1671), was bound to cause political opposition in a country in which anti-Catholicism was deeply ingrained. The already deep fear of popery in England was strengthened in the autumn of 1678 when Titus Oates came forward with details of an alleged Popish Plot to assassinate Charles II. Although James was not directly implicated by Oates, these revelations (which historians have found by and large to be unfounded) provoked the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-1681 in which successive parliaments (prompted by a fierce political campaign led by the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Whig Party) tried to put on the statute book three bills designed to exclude a Catholic from the succession to the throne. To safeguard his brother, Charles sent James into exile again, first in France (1679) and then in Scotland (1679-1682).