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James II inherited a stronger position than any Stuart since the accession of his grandfather. The Exclusion Crisis had been weathered; the Whigs were broken and Shaftesbury dead; the Tory-Anglican establishment rallied to the principles of hereditary right and passive obedience; and the loyalist Parliament of 1685 voted the new king a generous revenue for life. Within less than four years he had lost everything — his throne, his crown, and the cause of his Church — and had fled the kingdom, allowing a Dutch prince to take his place by parliamentary invitation. How a reign that began with such advantages ended in the so-called Glorious Revolution is one of the great problems of English history, and it is the revolution at the centre of this breadth study — the decisive turning point towards which the first half of the course builds, and from which the constitutional settlement of 1689 flows.
Two large interpretive questions frame the lesson. The first is causation: was James the architect of his own downfall — a king whose reckless drive to advance Catholicism needlessly destroyed his natural Tory-Anglican base — or was he the victim of forces beyond his control: an ingrained Protestant prejudice that would never have tolerated a Catholic king, and a Dutch invasion launched in William of Orange's own strategic interest? The second concerns the character of 1688 itself. The traditional Whig label, "the Glorious Revolution", implies a bloodless, providential and conservative event — a restoration of ancient liberties rather than an upheaval. But was it truly "glorious", and was it truly a "revolution"? These are precisely the questions the Section C interpretations exercise will ask you to weigh, and this lesson is designed to equip you to answer them.
Key enquiry: Did James II destroy himself through his own Catholicising policies, or was he the victim of structural anti-Catholicism and Dutch ambition — and was the Revolution of 1688 a genuine revolution or a conservative restoration achieved, in England at least, with remarkably little bloodshed?
James succeeded peacefully on 6 February 1685, his position bolstered by undisputed hereditary right, a fervently loyal Anglican-Tory Parliament, and the swift crushing of a rebellion that seemed, at first, to vindicate his rule.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Leader | James Scott, Duke of Monmouth — Charles II's illegitimate but Protestant son, who landed at Lyme Regis claiming the crown and styling himself the defender of Protestantism against his Catholic uncle. |
| Support | Drawn largely from West Country Dissenters and the "middling sort"; the gentry held back, and the rebellion never seriously threatened the regime's survival. |
| Battle of Sedgemoor | 6 July 1685 — Monmouth's untrained force was destroyed in the last pitched battle fought on English soil. |
| Aftermath | Monmouth was executed (botched, by the incompetent axeman Jack Ketch); the "Bloody Assizes" under Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys condemned around 300 rebels to death and some 800 to transportation — a savagery that, though directed at rebels, foreshadowed the regime's harshness. |
Paradoxically, the rebellion's defeat weakened James in the long run. It gave him the pretext to enlarge the standing army to around 20,000 men — and then to officer it with Catholics in defiance of the Test Act, raising precisely the spectre of "popery and arbitrary government" that would unite his enemies. A rebellion that seemed to confirm the loyalty of the nation thus handed the king the means and the excuse to alienate it.
James's overriding aim was to secure freedom, and ultimately equality, for his fellow Catholics — and, his enemies believed, to re-Catholicise England. To achieve it he relied on the royal prerogatives of suspending and dispensing with statutes, systematically alienating the Tory-Anglican establishment that was his natural support.
| Policy | Impact |
|---|---|
| Catholic army officers | Appointed in breach of the Test Act, relying on the dispensing power upheld in the collusive test case Godden v. Hales (1686), in which a bench packed by the king ruled that he could exempt individuals from the Act. This created acute fear of a Catholic-officered standing army and military tyranny. |
| Ecclesiastical Commission (1686) | A new prerogative court to discipline the Anglican clergy — looking ominously like the abolished High Commission and a revival of exactly the arbitrary jurisdiction the Long Parliament had swept away in 1641. |
| Declaration of Indulgence (1687, reissued 1688) | Suspended the penal laws and Test Acts by prerogative — the very power Parliament had forced Charles to abandon in 1673. It was an attempt to build a "King's party" of grateful Catholics and Dissenters outside, and against, the Anglican establishment. |
| Magdalen College, Oxford (1687) | James expelled the Protestant Fellows who refused his Catholic-leaning nominee and imposed a president on the college — a direct assault on one of the Anglican gentry's most cherished institutions and a warning of what royal power might do to the universities and the Church. |
| Remodelling the corporations and the "Three Questions" | James purged town corporations and lord-lieutenancies, replacing Anglican Tories with Catholics and Dissenters, and canvassed officials on whether they would support repeal of the Test Acts — a systematic attempt to pack a compliant future Parliament. |
The fatal political miscalculation was to alienate the Tories — the party of divine right and passive obedience, the Crown's most reliable friends. The doctrine of non-resistance, which the Anglican clergy had preached throughout the Exclusion Crisis, rested on a tacit bargain: the Church would uphold the sacred, unbreakable authority of the Crown, and the Crown would uphold the privileged, established position of the Church. By using the prerogative to override the laws the Anglican gentry held sacred, by reviving a High-Commission-style court to discipline Anglican clergy, by assaulting Magdalen College, and by courting the Dissenters the Tories distrusted, James broke his side of that bargain. He made loyalty to the Church and loyalty to the king pull in opposite directions, and so demolished the doctrine of non-resistance from within. When the test came, he found he had no party left to defend him — the very people whose whole creed was obedience to the Crown had been driven to conclude that obedience to this Crown meant the ruin of their Church.
A central interpretive question — and one a strong candidate should confront directly — concerns James's ultimate aims. Did he intend merely toleration and equality for his fellow Catholics, or the wholesale re-Catholicisation of England, by force if necessary? The answer shapes how we judge both his policies and the Revolution that resisted them.
| Reading of James's aims | Evidence and argument |
|---|---|
| Limited: toleration only | James repeatedly professed to seek only liberty of conscience and an end to the penal laws; he sought to recruit Dissenters as well as Catholics, suggesting a genuine (if self-interested) toleration rather than a Catholic monopoly. On this view, his tragedy was tactical clumsiness, not tyrannical design. |
| Ambitious: Catholic absolutism | His contemporaries — and historians such as Steve Pincus — saw something more systematic: a drive to "catholicise" the state by packing the army, the universities, the corporations, and a future Parliament with Catholics and compliant Dissenters, on the model of Louis XIV's France. The standing army, the dispensing power, and the assault on Magdalen all pointed, they feared, towards an absolutism in which Catholicism would be entrenched and Protestant resistance disarmed. |
The truth is genuinely uncertain, and the uncertainty is itself analytically important. What mattered politically was not James's private intention but what his subjects believed he intended — and in a culture saturated with anti-popery and the memory of the 1641 Irish massacres, the worst was readily believed. The decisive context here was Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which stripped French Protestants of their toleration and unleashed savage persecution, driving tens of thousands of Huguenot refugees into England with their stories of dragonnades and forced conversions. The Revocation seemed to prove, before English eyes, exactly what a Catholic king would do to Protestants once he held the power. James's reliance on the prerogative thus fell on ground already primed to read every measure as the opening move of a French-style Catholic despotism. Whether or not James was sincere in professing limited aims, he governed a nation predisposed to disbelieve him — and his methods gave that disbelief every encouragement.
When James ordered his second Declaration of Indulgence read aloud in every church, seven bishops — including Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury — petitioned to be excused, denying that the king could lawfully suspend statutes. James, enraged, had them tried for seditious libel. Their acquittal on 30 June 1688 was greeted with bonfires and national rejoicing, and even with acclaim from the soldiers in the king's own camp on Hounslow Heath. It was a catastrophe for James: it demonstrated that the king could not command the courts, the Church, or even the loyalty of his own army, and it cast the Anglican establishment — hitherto the great preacher of passive obedience — in the role of the defenders of law against the Crown. The bishops who had taught obedience were now the heroes of resistance.
Until June 1688 the crisis was, in a sense, survivable, and this is a point of the first importance for understanding the timing of the Revolution. James was ageing; his heirs were his two Protestant daughters, Mary (married to William of Orange) and Anne; and Englishmen could reasonably hope to outlast an elderly Catholic king and to see the throne pass, in the ordinary course of nature, to a Protestant. The birth of a son, James Francis Edward, on 10 June 1688 destroyed that hope at a stroke, raising the prospect of a permanent Catholic dynasty stretching indefinitely into the future. Hostile propaganda at once spread the fiction that the baby was an impostor, smuggled into the birth-chamber in a warming-pan — an absurd tale, but one that measures the desperation of Protestant opinion. It was this event, converting a temporary aberration into an indefinite future, that tipped the balance from grumbling endurance towards active intervention.
On the very day the bishops were acquitted, seven leading men — later celebrated as the "Immortal Seven", and spanning both Whig and Tory — sent a formal Invitation to William of Orange to come to England with an army to secure a free Parliament and to investigate the suspicious birth. William, the Dutch Stadtholder and Europe's foremost Protestant champion, had his own compelling motive to accept: to bring England's wealth, navy and manpower into his coalition against Louis XIV, whose attention was fortunately distracted into the Rhineland in the autumn of 1688. The invitation gave him the pretext and a measure of domestic cover; the decision to sail was his own, taken in his own and the Dutch Republic's strategic interest.
William landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688 with a formidable force of around 15,000 — a genuine invasion, not a coup. James advanced to Salisbury but lost his nerve as his support melted away: key officers, including John Churchill (the future Duke of Marlborough), defected, and even his daughter Anne abandoned him. His regime collapsed without a major battle. After a first failed attempt at flight, James finally fled to France on 23 December 1688, throwing the Great Seal into the Thames as he went — an act of abdication-by-flight that conveniently spared the consciences of those unwilling to depose an anointed king. He had, in effect, resigned the throne rather than fight for it.
It is easy, with hindsight, to treat William's success as inevitable — but a strong answer recognises how much hung on contingency, and how nearly the whole enterprise might have failed. Several factors had to align, and most lay outside the control of either king or invader.
| Contingent factor | Significance |
|---|---|
| The "Protestant wind" | William's first attempt was driven back by storms; a favourable easterly wind in November 1688 then carried his fleet down the Channel while pinning the English navy in port — celebrated by Protestants as providential, but in fact a matter of weather. |
| Louis XIV's distraction | Crucially, Louis chose in the autumn of 1688 to turn his armies into the Rhineland rather than threaten the Dutch Republic, freeing William to gamble his whole army on an English invasion. Had Louis moved against the Dutch, William could never have sailed. |
| The collapse of James's nerve and army | James had a larger army than William, yet he advanced to Salisbury and then retreated without giving battle, his will apparently broken by the defections and by a debilitating nosebleed at the critical moment. A bolder king might have fought — and, given his numbers, might have won. |
| James's flight | By fleeing (twice) and throwing away the Great Seal, James handed his enemies the "abdication" they needed. Had he stayed and fought, or even remained in England as a prisoner, the legal and political problem of replacing him would have been far harder to solve. |
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