Kinlight · The British Royal Line

King James II

1633 – 1701 · Generation XXVII · King of England, Scotland and Ireland (r. 1685–1688) · House of Stuart

Portrait of King James II

James was born at St James’s Palace on 14 October 1633, the second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, and was styled Duke of York from birth. He was still a child when civil war broke out in 1642, and he was at Edgehill that October with his elder brother Charles. When Oxford surrendered in 1646 he was taken prisoner, but in April 1648, on his father’s orders, he slipped his guards and escaped to The Hague. The exile that followed made him a soldier. He fought in the French army under Turenne and then, when England’s republican government allied with France, on the Spanish side, commanding British volunteers at the Battle of the Dunes.

The Restoration of 1660 put his brother on the throne as Charles II and made James heir presumptive. That September he married Anne Hyde, daughter of Charles’s chief minister, Edward Hyde, against almost everyone’s advice, and of their children only two daughters survived, the future queens Mary and Anne. As Lord High Admiral he took a close hand in running the navy and commanded the fleet in person at Lowestoft in 1665 and Solebay in 1672. He was governor of the Royal Adventurers into Africa, later the Royal African Company, which by the 1680s was shipping thousands of enslaved Africans a year to the Caribbean. The captured Dutch colony of New Netherland was renamed New York in his honour, and during the Great Fire of London in 1666 his firefighting won public praise.

In exile James had been drawn to the Catholic Church, and around 1668 or 1669 he converted, at first in secret. The Test Act of 1673 made it public, since he gave up the admiralty rather than take the Anglican oath and sacrament it required. Anne Hyde had died in 1671, and in the autumn of 1673 James married Mary of Modena, a fifteen-year-old Italian Catholic princess. Fears of a Catholic king, inflamed by Titus Oates’s invented “Popish Plot”, produced the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681, when Whig members of Parliament tried to bar him from the succession. The attempt failed, and after the Rye House Plot of 1683 turned opinion back towards the royal brothers, he returned to the Privy Council.

Charles II died in February 1685, and James succeeded him at fifty-one with little opposition, crowned with Mary at Westminster Abbey that April. Rebellions by the Earl of Argyll in Scotland and the Duke of Monmouth in the West Country were quickly crushed, and hundreds of Monmouth’s followers were hanged or transported after the Bloody Assizes. James then enlarged his standing army and used his dispensing power to let Catholics hold commissions without taking the Test. Parliament, until then cooperative, protested, and in November 1685 James prorogued it. He did not call it again. In 1687 his Declaration of Indulgence suspended the penal laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters alike, and he set about purging local office-holders to pack a future Parliament.

Two events in June 1688 brought matters to a head. On 10 June the queen gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward, opening the prospect of a Catholic dynasty in place of James’s Protestant daughter Mary. On 30 June seven bishops whom James had prosecuted for seditious libel were acquitted, and that same day seven leading Protestants invited William of Orange, Mary’s husband and James’s nephew, to bring an army to England. William landed at Brixham on 5 November. Many of James’s officers, John Churchill among them, deserted to him, as did his daughter Anne, and James lost his nerve. He threw the Great Seal into the Thames and tried to flee, was caught in Kent, and was then allowed to leave for France on 23 December. In February 1689 a Convention Parliament declared the throne vacant and gave it jointly to William and Mary.

With French troops James landed in Ireland in March 1689, but William defeated him at the Boyne in July 1690, and he returned to France, never to see his kingdoms again. Louis XIV gave him the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he lived out his last years as an austere penitent. He died there in September 1701, aged sixty-seven, and Louis recognised his son as James III. Whig historians long portrayed him as a bigoted tyrant, while some twentieth-century writers praised him as a champion of religious toleration. More recent scholarship has tended towards a middle view, in which his commitment to toleration was real and so was his wish to strengthen the crown.

Place in the family

  • King James II was a 4× great-nephew of King Henry VIII.
  • King James II was the youngest of 3 children of King Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France recorded in this archive.

Images

One of 17 people of House of Stuart (from 1371) in this archive. Scotland’s royal house for three centuries before James VI inherited England and wore both crowns.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → King Charles I → King James II.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Partners

  • Married Anne Hyde (1637 – 1671) in 1660 — 2 children together
  • Married Mary of Modena (1658 – 1718) in 1673 — one child together

Children

Life

  • 1633 — Born
  • 1660 — Married Anne Hyde
  • 1673 — Married Mary of Modena
  • 1685 — James succeeds his brother, Charles II.
  • 1685 — The Duke of Monmouth rebels against James, but is defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset.
  • 1686 — James takes first measures to restore Catholicism in England, and sets up a standing army of 13,000 troops at Hounslow to overawe nearby London.
  • 1688 — James, believing his Divine Right as King, issues the Declaration of Indulgence to suspend all laws against Catholics and Non-Conformists and repeal the 1673 Test Act. He seeks to promote his Catholic supporters in Parliament and purge Tories and Anglican clergy .
  • 1688 — James’ wife, Mary of Modena, gives birth to a son and Catholic heir. His daughters Mary, married to Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange, and Anne by his first wife Anne Hyde are Protestant.
  • 1688 — Following discontent over James attempts to control politics and religion, seven leading statesmen invite William of Orange, son-in-law of James, to England to restore English liberties.
  • 1688 — The 'Glorious Revolution'. William of Orange lands at Torbay with an army of 20,000 and advances on London. Many Protestant officers in James' army including Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and James' own daughter Anne defect to support William and his wife Mary.
  • 1688 — James abdicates and flees to exile in France.
  • 1701 — Died

Sources

  1. James II of England · Wikipedia
  2. James II (r. 1685–1688) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. James II of England · World History Encyclopedia

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