David Womersley

JAMES II

The Last Catholic King

ALLEN LANE

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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2015

Copyright © David Womersley, 2015

Cover design by Pentagram
Jacket art by Gisela Goppel

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-97707-2

Contents

Genealogical Table

JAMES II

1. The Varieties of Whig History

2. Duke of York

3. King of England, Scotland and Ireland

4. Exile and Death

Illustrations

Picture Credits

Bibliographical Essay

Notes

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1

The Varieties of Whig History

James II reigned for less than four years, from February 1685 to November 1688. Yet his short reign was one of the great pivots of English constitutional history. James ascended the throne with the formidable prerogative powers of the Stuart monarchy intact, and with Parliament as still a junior partner in the governance of the realm (Parliament had met for only eleven of the first forty years of the seventeenth century). After 1688 the prerogative powers of the crown, although still considerable, were acknowledged to be subject to parliamentary curbs. Furthermore Parliament itself had been transformed ‘from an event into an institution’, becoming a permanent part of the constitution, and one which met regularly.¹ The debacle of the end of James’s reign, it has been said, was nothing less than ‘a landmark moment in the emergence of the modern state’, in which ‘the character of English state and society relations was fundamentally transformed’.²

If James’s brief reign was momentous in its political consequences at the time and during the following decades, it has for later generations proved to be no less of a battleground in English historiography. In 1931 the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield famously took aim at what he called ‘the Whig Interpretation of History’, a complacent teleological narrative in which the English nation had steadily advanced towards liberty, the rule of law and parliamentary democracy.³ Butterfield’s point was not to deny that these were in themselves very good things; simply that one could not regard them as the natural and necessary outcome of an historical process. The events of the reign of James II had played a cardinal role in the forging of this ‘Whig Interpretation’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And, even today, the years 1685–8 present challenging campaigning territory over which historians of various stripes still engage with one another in displays of sometimes dazzling technical virtuosity.⁴ However, it would be a mistake to think that there was only one kind of ‘Whig Interpretation’ of the reign of James II. To pause for a moment over the different kinds of Whig historiography will bring out the key issues which any account of the years 1685–8 must address.

Nine days after his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne the exiled James II landed at Brest and immediately began trying to persuade Louis XIV to entrust him with another army for the reconquest of his lost kingdoms. The campaign in Ireland, he urged, had depleted England of troops. Nothing could now withstand French forces, and furthermore his contrite people were eager to make amends for the disloyalty and ingratitude they had shown to their rightful monarch.

Louis was too polite to utter an outright refusal, but he was also resolved not to accede to James’s request, and so he feigned illness in order that the unpleasant subject could not be raised. Macaulay describes the undignified position in which this left James:

During some time, whenever James came to Versailles, he was respectfully informed that His Most Christian Majesty was not equal to the transaction of business. The highspirited and quickwitted nobles who daily crowded the antechambers could not help sneering while they bowed low to the royal visitor, whose poltroonery and stupidity had a second time made him an exile and a mendicant. They even whispered their sarcasms loud enough to call up the haughty blood of the Guelphs in the cheeks of Mary of Modena. But the insensibility of James was of no common kind. It had long been found proof against reason and against pity. It now sustained a still harder trial, and was found proof even against contempt.⁵

This portrait of James as a man both stupid and despicable is a dominant feature of Macaulay’s History of England, which throughout lays a heavy emphasis on James’s incurable faults of head and heart. James’s Declaration of 1692 – a document consisting largely of lists of those of his former subjects, some designated by name, others designated more generally by reference to particular failures of conduct, who were to expect no mercy in the event of his restoration – Macaulay regarded as entirely characteristic: ‘the whole man appears without disguise, full of his own imaginary rights, unable to understand how any body but himself can have any rights, dull, obstinate and cruel’.⁶

Macaulay’s history of the reign of James and of the Glorious Revolution which dethroned him was massively researched, as recent historians have acknowledged.⁷ Nevertheless, its portrait of James as a man both mischievous and stupid, who attempted to remodel the institutions and character of England in a way that its people would never countenance, has paradoxical consequences. It makes the success of William of Orange in 1688 seem inevitable (which perhaps does less than justice to William’s daring in launching such an audacious combined-forces operation in the depths of a northern European winter): 1688 was a notable staging post on the march of the English people towards the liberties Macaulay himself enjoyed in the mid nineteenth century. But it also makes the policies of James’s reign seem inexplicable except as the product of almost unbelievable obtuseness on the part of the monarch. Finishing Macaulay’s History of England, the reflective reader is liable to put down his book and ask the question, ‘but why would anyone have tried, as James did, to reconvert England to Roman Catholicism, and to remodel its constitution on the lines of continental absolutist monarchies such as France?’ By making the triumph of liberty and Protestantism a foregone conclusion, Macaulay is obliged to portray James as a Stuart King Canute (in the popular misunderstanding of that wise monarch’s behaviour on the beach), who vainly attempted to turn back the resistless tides of history.

However, the accounts of Whig historians closer in time to the events of James’s reign do not display Macaulay’s complacency about the outcome of the historical process. The ‘Preface’ to the Quadriennium Jacobi, or the History of the Reign of King James II of 1689 is characteristic. The subtitle – ‘From his first Coming to the Crown to his Desertion’ – is sufficient evidence of the Whiggish standpoint from which the history was written, since it was a cardinal objective of the Whigs following James’s flight to France to have this deemed an abdication (or desertion).⁸ The author of the Quadriennium is as persuaded as Macaulay would be 150 years later that James was mischievous and misguided: ‘Seldom do we find a President of any Prince that laboured, against all the Common Rules of Policy, so industriously to lose a Crown, when he had once fix’d it on his Head, as James II.’⁹ But what James rashly and wickedly attempted was not, to this contemporary, as ridiculously impractical as it would appear to be to Macaulay. For those who experienced them, the religious and political policies of James’s reign were marked by a terrifying, violent energy: ‘nor did he gradually and insensibly endeavour to introduce his Innovations of Popery and Slavery, but rush’d and broke in like a Torrent with open and armed violence upon the Ancient Constitution of the Nation.’ As a result, James very nearly succeeded in subverting ‘the British Monarchy, the Glory whereof was almost brought to utter Ruin and Destruction’.¹⁰

Which of these kinds of Whig history – the massively untroubled Victorian Whiggism of Macaulay, or the more hysterical seventeenth-century Whiggism of the Quadriennium – is closer to the truth? Did James, out of a mixture of stupidity and malice, attempt the impossible, as Macaulay implied? Or were the religious and political objectives of his reign not only feasible (albeit in the end unwelcome to a majority of his subjects), but in fact very nearly achieved? Were they even, perhaps, not as wicked and ‘un-English’ as both Macaulay and the author of the Quadriennium would brand them?